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 )

I remember so many of these.
But also Jane Eyre, when she describes the death of Helen Burns. Her first, true friend in the world. Helen had no family and no friends to love her. But she was calm and obedient and gentle.
Makes me cry every time!
I think I'm going to have to re-read some of these books.

Lee Scoresby and Hester, just read it again and properly howled!

2 books by Maggie O Farrell. After you've gone when you realise the scarf shes bern knitting is for her dead husband and the hand that first held mine, I can't quite remember what happened though. Think one of the main characters had given her son up for adoption and that was when you realise how the past and present stories link?

Oh 'The Lovely Bones'...all the descriptions of her heaven and watching her family. I read it for the first time after losing a friend in a terrible way. It was strangely reassuring that she might still be watching her family from her version of heaven.

@Passmethecrisps I am with you on Behind the Scenes at the Museum, I loved it too.

Me too. Brilliant brilliant writing.

This is a great thread - I love reading other people’s perceptions and emotional responses to books.

I went through a phase where I could barely read a child’s books without crying. Worst offenders were Paper Dolls. The bit where the boy cuts them up but they sing defiantly and meet a kind granny in the girl’s memory.

Snail and the whale “I feel so small”

Stick man - all of it actually. That’s a brutal story really. My dh now always refers to our home as the family tree and when he is away for work it makes me a bit emotional.

Not so many months ago I read a book of Greek myths to my daughter. When we got to the end of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice I had to excuse myself as it literally choked me up and I started crying. Whenever I think about the story now it gets me.

Plot summary: Eurydice dies. Her husband Orpheus goes to the underworld to get her back. He is allowed to take her with him on the condition that she follows him and he doesn't look back - if he does she will have to stay in the underworld forever. He plays his lyre and she follows him - and when they are almost there he sees the overworld and turns to tell her in his excitement.....

Honestly just writing it makes me well up!

Is that Stephen Frys telling? He does it very well indeed. It us very sad.

I was trying to tell dh about behind the scenes earlier on and couldn’t do it without filling up. I am glad I am not alone. I keep reading about other books which, in my very genuinely humble opinion are just not very good, impact on people. By this is the beauty of reading. There is nothing I love more than a book which blurs the lines to the point where I start wondering how so and so is doing then realise they are in my head

"It came on Chris how strange was the sadness of Scotland’s singing, made for the sadness of the land and sky and in dark autumn evenings, the crying of men and women of the land who had seen their lives and loves sink away in the years."

From Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon

I loved behind the scenes at the museum.but cant remember it!

It has to be the fate of Boxer in Animal Farm. We know he is an allegorical figure, of course, but Orwell writes so skilfully that it is utterly heartbreaking.

The children entering the concentration camp hand in hand in Charlotte Gray. I couldn't read any more after that.

@LittleFairywren haha it's fine. It's just further stoked my general sense of impending doom about the entire series 😂.

The first and only time I've genuinely been shocked at a death in a book was Fred in Harry Potter.
I read the books as a bit of a guilty pleasure (still reread them all the time), and even though I we had gone through so many other character deaths, I naively thought the Weasley's would be safe. I had to reread that page multiple times before I understood why happened. It only sunk in at the end where all the dead characters are laid out in the Great hall.

@Floopily oh, fuck. You just got me.

@AveAtqueVale

I so wish I could read them again for the first time. I'm very jealous! Dh has just read the assassin trilogy and he's started on the liveship traders. So jealous that he gets to discover it all for the first time!

2nd John Connolly, The book of lost things and the end of Villette.

I was reading Return of the King and the Battle outside Gondor. Had to put it down, tear streaked getting reassurance from my dad at 15 that Merry and Pippin hadn't died.

Howling and very pregnant on the couch reading Tess. The ending broke my heart. Poor Tess, her sister.

Lovely to see the love for btsatm. One of my favourite books. I find the whole thing so heart breaking.

Boxer’s acceptance when he goes off to be slaughtered.
Ginger in black beauty.
Heathcliffe and the passage about haunt me, torment me only don’t leave me here in this abyss.
The way John Coffey accepts his fate.
Doctor sleep when they murder the child, it isn’t detailed but the line ‘please kill me’ is soul destroying.
The scene at the end of the grapes of wrath.

Oh goodness yes to Sunset Song!

The chess game in Pawn in Frankincense when he has to choose one of the children to die.

Matthew's final words to Anne before he dies in Anne of Green Gables. I well up even thinking about it.

I was coming here to post Doctor Sleep. The line about how he cries for his mother and then he screams so hard and so long that he ruptures his vocal cords and can only whisper pleas to be killed. It finished me. I'd recently had DC2 and I couldn't continue the book after that bit.

When Bela the pony dies in book 14 of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan.
I cried and cried. She had trotted, galloped, swam rivers and carried stuff for 13 books and hours away from safety she gets hit with an arrow. "She whinnied softly and drew a final breath, then died."