A scene or a line which you remember

SPOILER

the ending to Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. “This is what I miss, Cordelia. Not something that has happened but something that will never happen. Two old women giggling over their tea.”

The main character is on the plane home having left her old friend/bully behind and she sees two old ladies playing cards and drinking tea.

Christ - I wouldn't be able to, I guarantee it. That bit kills me even more than the 'Charlotte was both' ending.

LetHim Try reading that to a Y6 class without crying. I just about managed it, but some of the children didn't.

'Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.'

The Handmaid's Tale. "We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy" pops into my head often.

lovely thread, thank you.
from Brideshead Revisited 'I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.'
The protagonist is lighting Julia's cigarette (who will be his lover, many years hence).
Bad
in the beginning of an Ian McEwen novel (which I don't even like that much) someone dies because a balloon he is holding onto goes up and he holds on too long. I'm sure there are more horrifying things than the description of the dead body, but I can't get it out of my head. Years and years afterwards.

@pangolina

"O God please give him back! I shall keep asking You". This is so sad.

@AtlanticCityProof it's perfect isn't?

I don’t have it to hand so can’t quote from it but the death of Ruth May in The Poisonwood Bible is the single most moving thing I’ve ever read in a novel.

@Bobbybobbins

thank you for guiding me to that poem.

The last line from A Prayer for Owen Meaney

SPOILERS

"O God please give him back! I shall keep asking You".

I read it shortly after a bereavement and it pierced my heart. It still does.

From Grassic Gibbon's 'Sunset Song'

Ewan,the heroine's husband, ruined and coarsened by the first world war, is charged with desertion and sentenced to death. A friend gets into his cell and they talk. Ewan talks of his wife and the farm. So simply and beautifully realised, it is absolutely heart rending.

That’s so sad @sashh
I’m glad they found something so fitting.

Not a line from a book, but I watched a documentary about Dunblane, one of the children has a poem by A A Milne on their tombstone. It sums up perfectly what young children are like, but the last line makes me cry.

When I was one,
I just begun.

When I was two,
I was nearly new.

When I was three,
I was hardly me.

When I was four,
I was not much more.

When I was five,
I was just alive.

But now I’m six,
I'm as clever as clever.

So I think I'll be six now,
forever and ever!

Billy Liar’s grandmother saying “he want to get himself dressed of a morning” and “he wants to burn that raincoat.”

Tom Stoppard, Rozencratz and Guildenstern are Dead 'We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke and the presumption that once our eyes watered'

SPOILERS

The last line of Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”

I sobbed for hours after reading that and it has stuck with me.

"And she came".

I know it's a children's book, but I was reading Owl Babies to DD last night and it struck me how wonderful that line is, with the illustration of the owl sweeping through the woods. It just gives a wonderful feeling of peace and reassurance.

A couple of one-liners:
In Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood actress Sally Bowles is robbed by a conman. When the police say,
you mean you spent the night with a stranger you had only met that day!
She replies, but you see Herr Kommissar, he wasn’t a stranger: he was my fiancé.

For some reason Flashman’s line: “the Victorian conscience is a mystery to me, thank God” tickles me. It would be a good line to work into an essay on ‘Tess of the Durbervilles’ I imagine.

A thread that got deleted this morning reminded me of Bertie Wooster saying “there’s some raw work at the font” although I’m cheating there because I got that from the telly.
The endings of Jane Gardam’s short stories are brilliant. I think the first one I read was in ‘the Sidmouth letters’ about a bunch of ghastly posh women meeting to remember a nanny they had all exploited. Their comeuppance is wonderful.
I’m enjoying this thread. I will be back with more.

Agree with the One Day scene. It was so sudden and shocking but also summed up just how quickly life can end.

The Crucible was a play that always stuck with me from school. The ending in particular where John dies rather than lies. Very thought provoking in terms of morals.

This, from Penelope Lively's "Moon Tiger"

The place didn't look the same but it felt the same; sensations clutched and transformed me. I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

And the phrase about Captain Corelli - "he remained a man of honour because he knew no other way to be" or something like that.

Great thread.