Most heartbreaking lines from a book ever...

I read a book called We were young and at war, which is a collection of extracts from teenage diaries from all round the world during WW2. One is from a book in Leningrad, about age 15, and it starts all positive, fun he''s had at the People's Palace, what he wants to do in the future and so on. Then, as the siege of Leningrad starts and progresses, all that fades away, and it becomes more and more about food and the lack if it. In the end, his mother takes his little sister to be evacuated, but she's too weak to take them both, and he's too weak to move by himself, so they just leave him, and the diary just stops because he dies, left there all on his own.

Yes , some wonderful choices. For my one the film faithfully reproduces the scene and also reduces me to tears.

I had so many things to do and read this evening, but Mumsnet has trumped them all with this remarkable thread.

Thank you OP for bringing me back from the brink of Instagram to the more important things in life.

The Grapes of Wrath. Quite near the beginning. The family have been evicted and is on the road. They stop to buy bread at a diner. The children are looking at sweets on the counter and what happens is one the very few acts of kindness in the book.

He dug in the pouch with a forefinger, located a dime, and pinched in for it. When he put it down on thecounter he had a penny with it. He was about to drop the penny back into the pouch when his eye fell on theboys frozen before the candy counter. He moved slowly down to them. He pointed in the case at big long sticksof striped peppermint. "Is them penny candy, ma'am?"

Mae moved down and looked in. "Which ones?"

"There, them stripy ones."

The little boys raised their eyes to her face and they stopped breathing; their mouths were partly opened, theirhalf-naked bodies were rigid

"Oh them. Well, no them's two for a penny."

"Well, gimme two then, ma'am." He placed the copper cent carefully on the counter. The boys expelled theirheld breath softly. Mae held the big sticks out.

"Take 'em," said the man

They reached timidly, each took a stick, and they held them down at their sides and did not look at them. Butthey looked at each other, and their mouth corners smiled rigidly with embarrassment.

"Thank you, ma'am." The man picked up the bread and went out the door, andhthe little boys marched stifflybehind him, the red-striped sticks held tightly against their legs. They leaped like chipmunks over the front seatand onto the top of the load, and they burrowed back out of sight like chipmunks.

The man got in and started his car, and with a roaring motor and a cloud of blue oily smoke the ancient Nashclimbed up on the highway and went on its way to the west. From inside the restaurant the truck drivers andMae and Al stared after them.

Big Bill wheeled back. "Them wasn't two-for-a-cent candy," he said

"What's that to you?" Mae said fiercely.

"Them was nickel apiece candy," said Bill

I can't quote it because it will spoil it for any mad person who has not yet read His Dark Materials but what Lyra says in the last chapter - you know the bit - destroys me every time.

Also I am completely unable to read or even look at the cover of Charlotte's Web without ugly crying.

And not a book, but when Eliza sings about the orphanage at the very end of the musical Hamilton (I don't think that's a spoiler as it's not a plot point and if there's a statute of limitations on spoilers it's definitely run out, they've all been dead at least 200 years!).

Just report your own post (or another you particularly like) and ask MNHQ to consider it for classics.

How can I nominate a thread for classics? I've been reading this all night
It's beautiful.

Inspired by that beautiful description of our final journey from Lord of The Rings, I would also offer these further words of wisdom from Gandalf. (Perhaps more uplifting than tear- inducing)

On the subject of Gollum, the murderous half-hobbit who seeks the Ring for his own, nefarious purposes, Frodo and Gandalf have this conversation:

Frodo: It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance.

Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.

Yes, that is beautiful, Haggischucker.

I couldn't copy and paste so screen shot it instead, this never fails to make me cry. Going to have it read at my funeral!

Am I allowed to share a short poem here? It's "The Two-Headed Calf", by Laura Gilpin, and it doesn't matter how many times I read it, that last line always gets me.

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

In Stephen King's Pet Sematary when you first learn that the little boy is going to die. It's a happy scene of the Dad & little Gage flying a kite together, and it's just suddenly dropped into the text. Something along the lines of "and Gage, who now have less than three months to live..".

It's just such an awful shock. But to be fair it is a Stephen King book so I shouldn't have expected it to end happily

MeatandPotato - glad I'm not the only one. I started reading it in the lounge, i.e. In the same room as DP, but disappeared into the bedroom within the first few pages and stayed there til I was finished the book, as I knew he wouldn't understand me sobbing all the way through. My cat came and joined me and was allowed to stay - she's less judgemental about these things!

Tearing up at some of these. Especially the 'last baby' quote.

Children's book I tear up is the baby book '10 little fingers and 10 little toes'
'And the next baby born was truly divine, a sweet little child who was mine, all mine'

The God of Small Things remains one of my favourite books, so poetic. It's not a tear-inducing quote but one I remember:

'If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts.'

No matter what Deborah Gilori made me cry and cry when I had my son and Beautiful Boy about a fathers heartbreak of his sons decent into addiction and the last chapter of a boy made of blocks about boy with autism I cried in an airport reading that one !

I loved War Horse too PP, wept from start to finish!

chips - when she's in the sea ?

Yes! That whole bit made me wail.

Another couple:
I like to think that nothing's final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don't, that it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, that you and I are always young in the woods, and that I'll see you sometime again, even if it's not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the way things go after all - that all things end happy.
Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

And from the same book:
Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they’re not what you hoped for them.

For anyone whose heart breaks over dogs or animals in book - please don't read Lily and the Octopus. There aren't any quotes that make sense out of context but I basically sobbed the entire way through

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

Bleak but beautiful.

I remember sobbing at a history book once, Somme by Lyn McDonald. It was a quotation or interview with a man who had been a soldier at the Somme when he was maybe late teens/early twenties. He was home on leave and his mother filled the tin bath in front of the fire and scrubbed his back for him the way she did when he was a little boy, and he was so comforted by it and she was so distraught with worry for him.

I must have read that 15 years ago and it has totally stayed with me.

I was struggling with a bereavement and there was a line in a book 'we all leave each other in the end' about relationships and death.

Found it oddly comforting.

And a book based on the concept that time is based on a möbius strip, so it goes and round rather than being linear. One of the paragraphs in it is something like:

Have you ever stayed in a place where you wanted someone who didn't want you? Well don't, never do. Get out. Don't stay in a place where you want someone who doesn't want you. Get out as quickly as you can and don't look back. That's all I can say, that's all you can do.

The poor little Swallow grew colder and colder, but he would not leave the Prince, he loved him too well. He picked up crumbs outside the baker’s door when the baker was not looking and tried to keep himself warm by flapping his wings. But at last he knew that he was going to die. He had just strength to fly up to the Prince’s shoulder once more. “Good-bye, dear Prince!” he murmured, “Will you let me kiss your hand?” “I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow,” said the Prince, “you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you.” “It is not to Egypt that I am going,” said the Swallow. “I am going to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?” And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet. At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two.

Don't know if anyone's mentioned the happy Prince yet but I find it utterly devastating!!

chips - when she's in the sea ?