What do you think are the saddest scenes/passages in literature? *General spoiler alert*

[QuimReaper]

For me, it's either:

• Lyra leafing Pantalaimon on the shore in The Amber Spyglass
• Will leaving to go back to his awful mother in Goodnight Mr Tom

Makes me tear up just thinking about either. What's yours?

Quotes would be much appreciated, even though I was too lazy to look any up!

(This thread will probably contain assorted spoilers, don't read on if you're going to complain about them )

Another vote for call of the wild, and white fang. The childhood me refused to read any of his other books, despite the fact several of the blurbs really interested me, and it’s only this thread that has reminded me I’m now more than old enough to try him again!

(Although I shan’t ever read Black beauty or watership down again and I still refuse to read the plague dogs)

SE Hinton's The Outsiders -- especially 'Stay gold, Ponyboy'. Wail.

And while we're on vintage US YA novels, Robert Cormier's The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, when Barney, having thought he was the sole healthy 'control' in a youth health facility testing experimental drugs on terminally ill kids, discovers his experimental treatment has meant induced amnesia -- he's actually dying like all the others.

The Yearning where he sees his dead friend.
Agree with Goodnight Mister Tom too.

Yearling

A couple of scenes stick out but the biggest one for me is when Sylvie dies at the end of Stonewylde series by Kit Berry. It happens so unexpectedly.

@Cacacoisfarraige - The Happy Prince! So traumatising when I first read it forty years ago that I never read it again. It's all come back to me ...

That bit in Jude the Obscure! I've never been able to finish the book nor have I read any Hardy since!

I don't know if this counts but the scene in Outlander (the book) where the wife puts on lavender perfume and physically attacks and basically rapes her husband to get him over the trauma of his own rape upset and disturbed me to the point that I couldn't watch the TV show anymore. I am actually angry with the author for doing something so inhumane to the character. As well as it making absolutely zero sense.

The Happy Prince is unbearably sad.
Also the end of The Pursuit of Love.

There’s a sad bit at the end of The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen when Portia runs away after she discovers her sister in law has been reading her diary and laughing about it with her friends.
She goes to a hotel where lonely, decent Major Brutt, unable to find a job despite his distinguished war service, is living. He looked up to Portia’s brother and sister in law, but Portia tells him they just laughed at him and despised the flowers he sent etc.
There was something so tragic about this scene of Major Brutt’s disillusionment.

^The Rose and the Nightingale* is another Oscar Wilde one that I can't bear to re-read.

PolkadotsAndMoonbeams. Yes!! I mentioned that further up - the cause of ugly sobbing in my childhood!!!

From the poem Shooting Stars by Carol Ann Duffy:

*How would you prepare to die, on a perfect April evening

with young men gossiping and smoking by the graves?*

How would you prepare to die, on a perfect April evening
with young men gossiping and smoking by the graves?

Also from “Shooting Stars” - the final lines:

Sister, if seas part us, do you not consider me?
Tell them I sang the ancient psalms at dusk
inside the wire and strong men wept. Turn thee
unto me with mercy, for I am desolate and lost.

A scene in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eyes when a poor black girl made a sanitary towel and while walking to a white woman's house to work, the friction caused her to orgasm and she had no idea what it was. Unbearable moment captured within the context of segregation, poverty and hopelessness. That sinke scene politizicd my reading.

Sauce3, that moment in Beloved. I had the amazing experience of meeting Toni Morrison and asked her if Seth did the right thing. She answered "It was the right thing to do but she didn't have the right to do it". That response makes me cry .

Ah yes, Duffy can do that to me. The Pages of the Sea that she wrote for the WWI centenary is very moving, especially when seen with the films of the faces on the beaches.

Always..

A line in Harry Potter, with some much resonance, meaning and value

I think the bit in whichever Anne book it was when her first baby died is incredibly sad. But the way people around her reacted was very telling too- showing that understanding of grief isn’t modern.

Recently it’s been Circe by Madeleine Miller that made me weep, fabulous book. As a child The Happy Prince (Oscar Wilde) had me in bits...none of that story is happy just heartbreaking.

There's a bit in Man and Boy by Tony Parsons where the protagonist's dad has just died and he talks about his mother's grief:

"Here’s what a happy ending looks like, I thought bitterly. You spend your life with someone and then, if they go before you, you feel as though you have lost all your limbs."

The ending of The Whitby Child by Robin Jarvis. When Nelda puts the ointment on Ben's eyes and takes his ability to see her and the other Aufwaders. When Aunt Alice walks into the sea and when Ben and Jennet's parents come back from the dead. First book that has ever moved me to tears.

And Marley and Me made me sob my heart out.

The Five People you Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom - I howled all the way through that. I was pg at the time (and didn't know it) though.

In Eleanor Oliphant when she drinks again.

Lots of bits in Everything Brave is Forgiven - just so stoic and such a love letter to London.

Anne's baby dying, Beth dying still gets me.

Oh and a really embarrassing one - in the Chalet School books when Jacynth's aunt dies and then writes to her posthumously. Ugly cry every time.

Harry Potter when Sirius died and then at the end he finds the mirror wrapped up, oh the angst my teenage heart felt and how angry I was with Harry for not remembering sooner! Could of avoided that one, and Fred, Tonks and Lupin dieing in the battle, unnecessary.

The entirety of The Green Mile, admittedly I'd seen the film before reading the book so new what was coming but it didn't stop the build up of emotions.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - when Mcmurphy comes back and The Cheif smothers him with the pillow.

Still Alice - I was not prepared for this one
When she can't understand how the mail is floating on the hole in the floor. When she can't remember where the toilet is and the very end of the book.

From All Quiet in the Western Front:

After years of fighting, Paul is finally killed in October of 1918, on an extraordinarily quiet, peaceful day. The army report that day contains only one phrase: “All quiet on the Western Front.” As Paul dies, his face is calm, “as though almost glad the end had come.”

Some great suggestions here!

I agree about the time travellers wife. The scene where he has travelled to the future and ‘comes back’ after he has died kills me. Imagine losing someone you love and them being able to come and hug you one last time.

I have always been moved by this from Birdsong - the part about the children who will now never be born. Not only the senseless loss of the young men killed fighting but the loss of so many children who will now never get the chance to live.

Names came patterning into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference