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 )

notheresa

Agree about all quiet on the western front. That end is so stark, from recollection it is preceded by a lengthy emotional passage from the narrator and the contrast is just That and for him to die after everything we have read on a quiet day when the war is about to end just encapsulates the senselessness of that war perfectly.

And while we are on WW1 literature, basically everything Stanhope says in Journeys End. That character is my favourite from any book or play and I haven’t dared watch the recent film in case I don’t like how he is played.

Not read full thread but there's a passage in the Poisonwood Bible... the youngest child dies and there's torrential rain and the tribal kids are chanting their version of mother may I... reading it you feel like you're there.

Rosemary Sutcliffe had a few that really upset me as a child, and still make me sad now

The King Arthur trilogy - when Arthur dies. I wept ugly tears for hours.

Song for a Dark Queen - there's a bit where Boudicca's forces are about to sack a city, and everyone is leaving, but one kind Roman man who I think is disabled, stays behind in his little garden with his apple tree, facing certain death, but allowing his household to escape in safety

The Mark of the Horselord - at the end, where the main character sees the plover feather and knows he is the true leader of his people, right before he sacrifices himself for them

For some reason I didn’t read Of Mice and Men at school so my first contact with it was a theatre tour last year. I posted on FB that I was at the theatre to see it when I arrived. I watched the first half (and loved it, it was a very good production) and in the interval looked at my FB, there was a message from a friend on the other side of the world saying ‘are you sure about watching this OMG?you do know what happens?’ Obviously I didn’t, so l looked up a synopsis on my phone. Just reading about the end made me cry and I had to leave the theatre before the second act.

Futility
by Wilfred Owen

The opening lines of the poem are so poignant.

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow......

@Witchend I agree about Harry Potter and the Battle of Hogwarts scenes. It was pretty obvious JK had really run out of steam by then, and lots of it felt rushed and unsatisfying; like Ron being able to open the Chamber of Secrets, and the diadem suddenly being introduced (I know she'd "planted" it in the Half Blood Prince, but it felt really rushed), and especially Voldemort thinking he was the only one to find the Room of Hidden Things or whatever it was called, when it was full of other hidden things It was just a bit oddly paced too, half the time everything's all urgent and there are countless Death Eaters descending on them, but Harry has a lot of time to fanny around, and they all stop to have a reunion with Percy. It was one of the few scenes I thought came to life better in the film than in the book.

I didn't mind the "Not my daughter, you bitch!" but I didn't think it was sad, more of a "fuck yeah!" moment, but it was enormously unrealistic as you say!

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.

Wow! What an amazing experience, I'm very jealous that you had the opportunity to meet her, and that you thought of such a great question. Toni was an amazing woman, and that's an incredible response.

"A Tree Grows In Brooklyn ". Francie's beloved dad, Johnny died a year before her school leaving ceremony. She goes into the classroom which is full of bouquets for the students, and sees a bunch of flowers and a card on her desk. The card is from Johnny, and for a few seconds she thinks it's all been a dreadful dream, and he's still alive. The card was written before Johnny died, and he'd left it with her auntie to send it to her, just in case he wasn't there. Such a heartbreaking scene. It's the moment when she thinks "Pappa would be waiting out in the hall......"

Dogger by Shirley `Hughes was the first book to make my little DD cry. Just thinking about it now brings tears to my eyes.

Oh yes OMG that made me cry too, especially as I had a big sister who would absolutely have done what Bella did.

"And then Bella did a very kind thing."

I think I'm the only Harry Potter fan in the world who didn't cry when Sirius died. Harry's grief and pain were very affecting, but we hardly knew the guy; he was only outed as Harry's godfather at the very end of PoA, then popped up in the fire a few times to do some useful exposition in GoF (sidenote: being able to floo directly into the Gryffindor Common Room is a pretty staggering security oversight, and one wonders why Sirius didn't just do that in PoA instead of defacing the Fat Lady ); then in OotP he's a bit of a sulky git all throughout, then he's gone. It's awful that the closest thing to a relative Harry has is taken away, but I'm always a bit bemused by people saying they sobbed when he died. I felt we hardly knew him well enough to care that much that he was gone.

Agreed on Sirius, @Quim. In fact, I think he's one of JKR's more interesting characters rash, arrogant, a bully, traumatised, lonely, angry, confusing his role as Harry's godfather with his friendship with James, not entirely successful at hiding his secret desire for Harry to be expelled so that he can have company at Grimauld Place etc in a fairly 'good guys vs bad guys' universe. But he's more a personification of Harry's hopes and fears about his parents and the magical world than a fully-realised character, and as you say, he's not there a lot.

In fact, DS has been listening to audiobooks, and while I thought at first that I simply didn't like the voice Stephen Fry gave Sirius, it got me thinking about how he's often not very likeable. Which is hardly surprising for a man who's been wrongly imprisoned for years, and then been living on the run on scraps and rats as a dog, then alone in a hideous house stuffed with dark magic and a creepy elf, but, no, I wasn't weeping when he died, either.

I was interested in the death 'beyond the veil' stuff because it's so early 20thc occult in feel, and there's the suggestion the dead are contactable because they're apparently speaking beyond the arch -- but it never reappears, does it? (And I had all kinds of questions about the extent to which having had your portrait painted appears to give you a form of afterlife. but not being photographed...)

KeepStill agree with every word! He is certainly much more of a compelling character in OotP than he is in GoF, his strops and his trying to resurrect his old mate James in Harry are really thought-provoking, and much more interesting than his "kindly wise godfather" shtick in GoF.

The veil never does reappear, no - I've always thought it was there so the DoM could investigate passing messages through the veil, as you say. I remember only Harry and Luna could hear the voices, a bit like how only they could see the thestrals. Did you ever read the Pottermore thing about the portraits? JKR wrote about how people can have their portrait painted and then dedicate a lot of time to putting their personality into it, so that it can sort of carry on after they die, which is an interesting idea - kind of like leaving an AI "download" behind, which can be consulted in a static state, but can (presumably) never develop. Having said that, one of the many bemusing things about The Cursed Child was all the weird lines about the portraits being "just old paint and memory" or whatever it was.

I love this thread. For some reason I missed reading the Lymond Chronicles when I was younger, and have just read Pawn in Frankincense. That chess game! Floods of tears. The end of Tom’s Midnight Garden always makes me cry when Tom embraces Mrs Bartholomew ‘ as if she was a little girl’. TigerJoy’ I agree about Rosemary Sutcliffe. The bit in The Lantern Bearers where Aquila meets his sister’s son and sends him back to her ‘ instead of a pair of scarlet slippers’

@pollyhemlock aaaaaah!

I nearly put the Lantern Bearers but couldn't narrow it down to a single moment to pick as sad! When the light goes out? When his father is killed? when he meets his sister once she's had a child and she wouldn't go with him? I understood that last one through the protagonist's eyes when I read it as a child. I reread it last year (age 40+) and suddenly understood why she'd stay and it was SO MUCH SADDER.

Same for Eagle of the 9th. And that one about the dolphin armlet. Lots of longing for parents and things that are lost...

I've never gone on Pottermore, @QuimReaper.

Though I was enough of a fan, back in the day to have gone to one of the midnight openings to get the last book, and had the entire last tube (admittedly full of mildly pissed people) to Brixton convinced JKR had killed off Hagrid.

I think I had Voldemort had torture Hagrid to make Harry give himself up and then kill him, and there was a 'just too late' deathbed scene between him and Harry which was a combination of the Selfish Giant and the death of Little Nell which would have done justice to a Victorian melodrama.

I might have killed off Ron as well. And Ginny, so that Harry and Hermione could be hard-bitten auror partners staking out the last vestiges of Dark magic, living on Woodbines and takeaway, never going to bed, and having dysfunctional sex with randoms.

In Hanya Yanagihra's first book "The People in the Trees" she describes lab dogs sitting in their too-small cages all day just looking at their paws because they've nothing else to do, waiting to be let out for their daily experiments.

I've never ever ever cried at a book before but I sobbed my heart out with that in the bath. When I got out, I crossed the whole passage out with a sharpie and forced my very luke-warm dog to cuddle with me for ages.

OMG KeepStill I don't know if I'd ever have forgiven you if I'd been on that tube I'd have had a hard time shaking my grudging respect for your imaginative powers though! (Out of interest, which bookshop did you get it from?) Your ending for H&H is far superior than the ghastly 'Epilogue' ending, I think I'll take it as my headcanon.

@TigerJoy Yes, there is so much in The Lantern Bearers. The bit where Aquila confesses to Ambrosius that he has released his nephew, an enemy, and his son Flavian comes to stand beside him. I think it’s my favourite of that sequence of books, though I love them all. She was so good at evoking time and place.

@TigerJoy You can see how much I have loved this book by the state it’s in!

I do cry a lot at books and films but there’s a lot on here I was quite unmoved by. Of course a lot of them I haven’t read!

Life after Life, The Lovely Bones, The Silent Assassin, The Time Traveler’s Wife all had me in tears. While I love His Dark Materials, the Hester and Lee bit is sad but not that sad. I agree the part where Lyra finds Tony, the severed child, is much more emotive.

Angela’s Ashes has the most emotional response from me I think. In one passage you can be laughing out loud; the next you’re in floods of tears. I both love it and hate it.

"Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died." Hester and Lee Scoresby's death in the Subtle Knife.

I was reduced to such a snivelling wreck when reading this to my kids that I had to give up, as they looked on in astonishment.

@sleeplessinderbyshire - A Monster Calls. Oh yes. I made the terrible mistake of reading this on a plane.

So many books I had forgotten about. I’ve just read A Monster Calls to teach it next week. Beautiful and haunting. And perfect for anyone wanting to teach the effect of sentence structure on the reader

Any WW1 Literature really effects me.

I read Marley and me last week on holiday. I cried reading the beautiful tribute John writes after Marley died.
I always cry at Dobby's death in HP.
I cried when Death came for all of Liesels family and neighbors in the Book Thief, especially when Rudi dies. It's so beautifully written