Most heartbreaking lines from a book ever...

Completely agree re Jude the Obscure.

I read another book once which referenced that bit of the story and said what a horrible man Hardy was to have written something so awful. At the time I read it I didn't have children. Now I do it's just unbearably sad.

Oh lambside 😭😭

By the shores of silver lake by Laura ingalls Wilder when her dog dies
'She stroked his head where the fine grey hairs were and she thought of how good he had always been. She had always felt safe from wolves or Indians because Jack was there. And how many times had he helped her bring in the cows at night. How happy they had been playing along Plum Creek and in the pool where the fierce old crab had lived and when she had to go to school he had always been waiting at the ford for her when she came home.
'Good Jack, good dog' she told him. He turned his head to touch her hand with the tip of his tongue. Then he let his nose sink on his paws and he sighed and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep now.
In the morning when Laura came down the ladder into the lamplight, Pa was going to do the chores. He spoke to Jack, but Jack did not stir.
Only Jack's body, stiff and cold, lay curled there on the blanket.
They buried it on the low slope above the wheatfield, by the path he used to run down so gaily when he was going with Laura to bring the cows. Pa spaded the earth over the box and made the mound smooth. Grass would grow there after they had all gone away to the west. Jack would never again sniff the morning air and go springing over the short grass with his ears up and his mouth laughing. He would never nudge his nose under her Laura's hand to say he wanted her to pet him. There had been so many times that she might have petted him without being asked, and hadn't.'

'The secret is not to give into it. It takes 10 times as long to pull yourself together as is does to fall apart'

God the bloody book thief. I think the writer uses the appalling sadness and awfulness of the actual holocaust to prop up some dreadful twee shite writing and cliched characterisation. I didn't think it was sad - I thought it was manipulative and weak and made sentimental nonsense out of an atrocious period of history. I am probably a cold hearted bitch but that was my reaction.

On the other hand, I thought Grief is a Thing with Feathers was a moving but not sentimental study of bereavement.

@CurlyhairedAssassin oh that's made my cry again.

'He loved Big Brother'. Closing lines of Nineteen Eighty Four. I don't cry but I feel choked up with frustration and despair when I read them.

Beth dying in Good Wives- 'in the arms in which she took her first breath, she quietly took her last.' Shame it's buried in the middle of a couple of paragraphs of long, long garbled sentences, as if the author was trying to shield herself from its emotional impact.

'When that this body did contain a spirit,/A kingdom for it was too small a bound; But now, two paces of the vilest earth/Is room enough' - Prince Hal's lines on Hotspur in Henry IV part 1. I always had a soft spot for Hotspur.

Actually that might be a line from the film, not the book.

OP, that’s a great one. I could hardly get the words out when I read it aloud to my sons.

Amos Diggory: Let me through, LET ME THROUGH! Let me through, THAT’S MY SON! That’s my boy! (Sobbing and frantic) IT’S MY BOY!

The Bronze Horseman-
Good-bye, my moonsong and my breath, my white nights and golden days, my fresh water and my fire. Good-bye, and may you find a better life, find comfort again and your breathless smile, and when your beloved face lights up once more at the Western sunrise, be sure what I felt for you was not in vain. Good-bye and have faith, my Tatiana.

Most beautiful book i have ever read and my god it broke me

Thanks

Hodge added it to dd's Christmas list.
quirky the book's called Schuyler's Monster by Robert Rummel-Hudson,well worth a read.

I had that Velveteen Rabbit reading at my (second) wedding as we were getting on a bit and a bit rubbed at the edges.
Not a dry eye..

@chickensaresafehere

It's a wonderful, classic children's book. I still read it as an adult and it gets me every time. Everyone should read it.

His Dark Materials are Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Brilliant books.

Mine is from The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay. A book I cry most of the way through and I have read it at least 10 times.

"It was a scream of anguish and rage, of terror and blinding agony, torn whole and bleeding from a tortured soul"

Northern Lights
The Subtle Knife
The Amber Spyglass

By Philip Pullman

chicken that really resonates with me, my dd (7) has ds and struggles to communicate.
Omg the Velveteen Rabbit
I had read Charlotte Gray, but I think I had blocked a lot of it out.
Drinkswine the books are The Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, I have read them many times but properly came to pieces reading them to dd1, especially that bit in the op.

The Northern Lights
The Subtle Knife
The Amber Spyglass

DS has just read that....broke his poor little heart.

I’m intrigued now. His dark materials trilogy, what are the names of the 3 books?

TheHodgeoftheHedge Such a beautiful book.

Oh Hodge that's beautiful!
Just reminds me of dd's threadbare,much loved mouse.

And if we're talking Hardy, it's the end of Tess that gets me:

"It is as it should be, she murmured. "Angel, I am almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!"

Always gets me...

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit