Lines in books that make your throat catch

Doesn't give me the catch in the throat, but Stevenson's Requiem always make me wistful.

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me: 5
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

How about Owen's 'Futility?'

Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil to break earth's sleep at all?

Sassoon again

?Who's this?alone with stone and sky?
It's only my old dog and I?
It's only him; it's only me;
Alone with stone and grass and tree.

What share we most?we two together?
Smells, and awareness of the weather.
What is it makes us more than dust?
My trust in him; in me his trust.?
― Siegfried Sassoon

I haven't Lydia but I shall look out for it. I have tead The Haunting, but ages ago.

When The Wind Blows :(

If we're including songs then "In The Ghetto".

...and his mama cries.

LauraChant have you read Memory by Margaret Mahy? Another favourite.

I am loving this thread so much . Thank you from me for all these words .

mignonette When The Wind Blows kills me every time. The blithe optimism, especially. Odd parts of it really upset me. Like when Hilda says the grass is a funny colour. It upsets me that they don't understand enough about what's going to happen in what little remains of their lives, even though I don't want them to.

Hurrah for the Green Knowe love.

Quangle I am the same with When A Child is Born. And Beautiful Boy - when Lennon sings "I can hardly wait/ To see you come of age". And, embarassingly, "did you think I would leave you dying" in Two Little Boys - because I have two little boys. Oh and finally if we are talking about songs: "Goodnight children everywhere, your mummy thinks of you tonight".

"Not now, Bernard" That poor neglected boy!

Not a book but a song, The Dark is Rising by Mercury Rev:
I dreamed that I was walking
And the two of us were talking
Of all life's mysteries
But words that flow between friends
Winding streams, without end
I wanted you to see
But it can seem surprising
When you find yourself alone
And now the dark is rising
And a brand new moon is born
I always dreamed I'd love you
I never dreamed I'd lose you
In my dreams, I'm always strong

It was on a radio once in the background when I was heavily pregnant and all of a sudden it got very dark outside and I burst into tears and knew I'd be playing it at the baby's funeral. Freaked me right out and I can't hear it without sobbing despite the baby being very grown up now!

I love that Sassoon one. There's a very naff Christmas song that evokes the same in me - the Johnny Matthis song, "When a child is born". It's the line about "For a spell or two, no one feels forlorn". Total sobber.

Laura that's my favourite children's book too, and my favourite line :)

Oh, the places you'll go. Dr Suess.

Can't remember exact lines, but I can't read it to DS, 3, because of the double edged sword of memories it conjures and the thoguth that that'll be my dcs one day.

Laura how lovely.

Oh, I forgot my favourite children's book, The Children of Green Knowe, where Tolly and his grandmother hear a voice singing Lulla Lullay.

"Why are you crying, Granny? It's lovely."
"It is lovely, only it is such a long time ago. I don't know why that should be sad, but it sometimes seems so."
...
She played, but it was Tolly who sang alone, while, four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep.

Ben Jonson 'Part Of An Ode' written about the loss of his own child-

"IT is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be;
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:
A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,
Although it fall and die that night;
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures, life may perfect be"

The author Susan Hill had 'A Lily of a Day' from this poem engraved on the headstone of her daughter Imogen, born too premature to survive. I cry whenever I read this poem.

I also cry at 'A Tree Grows In Brooklyn' when Francie loses her Father. And at Raymond Brigg's 'Ethel And Earnest' when they go to see Ethel's body at the morgue and there's a pot of bleach on the table next to her body. Then later on the drawings of Earnest eating his solitary lunch.....'Where The Wind Blows' is heartbreaking too.

There's a bit in Captain Corelli's Mandolin where the occupying German army takes control of the island and is instructed to round up the previously jointly-occupying Italian army (their staunch friends for months) and execute them all by firing squad. Leutnant Gunter Weber protests but gets nowhere apart from having his protest recorded. He also tries to delay shooting his friends but is urged on, with word that more Italians who need to be cut down by rifle fire are soon to arrive. When the crucial time inevitably comes, there are a couple of lines I struggled to read:

"Very well," said Weber, and he closed his eyes and prayed. It was a prayer that had no words, addressed to an apathetic God.

Oh my word - yes, the end of Lord of the Flies. I read it to the DSs and sobbed embarrassingly.

That Christopher Robin poem makes me well up every time - it is all about the innocence, isn't it?

For me it's the end of To Kill A Mockingbird - the bit where Scout is on Boo's porch seeing the street and events as Boo would have seen them (there's something about how Summer came, and he watched his children's hearts break), and then right at the end about Atticus - "he would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning".

Absolutely, FolkGirl.

VerySmallSqueak yes, there's more before my quote too, nothing major, just setting the scene and giving more of a context. Those couple of paragraphs describing people in their last hours of freedom, humanity and (often) life are just so utterly devastating, as MamaMary said.

It's the final line in my quote that gets me the most. Because it's true. We would - every single one of us.

And the fact that there are people around the world today experiencing similar levels of desperation and they don't feel any differently either...

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving
how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the
world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no,
nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem
to say so.

That KILLS me when Withnail does it in Withnail and I. So sad...so ironic that this struggling actor gives a killer performance in a rain washed London park with no audience but those wolves...