Lines in books that make your throat catch

[pongping]

Just been re-reading When We Were Very Young, and the lines in the last poem, Vespers, bring a tear to my eye every time:

Hush, hush, whisper who dares,
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers

I'm not sure why - I think it's the beauty of the innocence, the image of a lost world (the book is all nurses and stockings)?

In fact, just the title of the collection gives me a shiver.

Oh funny - I hadn't refreshed the thread and didn't see the Sam and Frodo references until I'd posted mine! Great minds...

I am reading the Anne of Green Gables books to ds3. I had read them when younger and I don't know how but I had forgotten this bit in Anne's House of Dreams

"At sunset the little soul that had come with the dawning went away, leaving heartbreak behind it. Miss Cornelia took the wee, white lady from the kindly but stranger hands of the nurse, and dressed the tiny waxen form in the beautiful dress Leslie had made for it. Leslie had asked her to do that. Then she took it back and laid it beside the poor, broken, tear-blinded little mother."

We lost our own baby girl almost two years ago now and I don't know if I would have dared to read it if I'd remembered. I could barely get the words out and then ds3 came over and hugged me.

Bits of books that have had me bawling are the Mirror of Erised in the first Harry Potter. The workhouse/Mrs Jenkins bit in Call the Midwife. The bit in Shadows of the Workhouse where the little girl thinks that the philanthropist chap is her father but her spirit is broken by the workhouse master. Too sad. Heidi - The bit in Germany where she sleepwalks because she misses the mountains and her grandfather. Birdsong.

Oh, WeAreSeven

Sorry you lost your baby girl WeAreSeven

I didn't know Goodbye Mog existed!

17 mo DS loves 'Mog the Forgetful Cat'. Was planning on getting a few more in the series. Might leave Goodbye Mog' for a few years yet..

Have been trying to remember where my most 'throat catching' moments have been. Melanie dying in Gone With The Wind was one, but I'd have to look up the actual lines. I've also found 'Ulysses' by Tennyson profoundly affecting although I know that's a poem.

... and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I love this one,but can't read it very often because it reminds me of my sister...

ee cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

WeAreSeven

What always brings me to tears is the ending of the Amber Spyglass when (spoilers) Lyra and Will realise they can't exist in the same universe. I first read it as a teen thinking love could overcome all obstacles and that it didn't broke me straight in two.

A line from "The Fault in Our Stars":
"The only person I wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters' death was Augustus Waters"
It entirely captured how I felt when a close friend died, and the utter hopelessness I felt.

Well, I've sobbed my way through this thread and now offer you a poem: High Flight by John Gillespie Magee. He was a WWII pilot and wrote this about how he felt when piloting his spitfire

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I?ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, ? and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of ? wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov?ring there,
I?ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I?ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew ?
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

• Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

He was killed in a flying accident over Lincolnshire a few months later. He was 19.

Here lies Dobby, a free elf.

Oh god. I just googled the end of Winnie The Pooh.

How beautifully sad.

Whereever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in the enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

Fite-I read that ee Cummings poem at my sisters wedding as it is bitter sweet for us too. It acknowledges our other sister who died.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

AA Milne will be causing a flood after tonight.

www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/81466.A_A_Milne

?If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.?

?How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.?

?Promise me you'll never forget me because if I thought you would, I'd never leave.?

?How do you spell 'love'?" - Piglet
"You don't spell it...you feel it." - Pooh?

?If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.?

What a writer!

123rd ,I am sorry you have also lost a sister.

I will miss mine until the day I die. It overwhelms me sometimes when I remember that I will never see her again.

The part in the boy in the striped pyjamas when Bruno and Shmuel die. I read it every year to two classes and I cry every time. The kids are quite kind about it.

Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.?

OK then, with a warning that this might be very painful for some...

Prayer For A Very New Angel

God, God, be lenient for her first night there,
the crib she slept in was so near my bed;
Her blue and white wool blanket was so soft;
Her pillow hollowed so to fit her head.

Teach me that she'll not want small rooms or me
When she has you and Heaven's immensity!
I always left a light out in the hall;
I hoped to make her fearless in the dark.
And yet - she was so small - one little light,
Not in the room, it scarcely mattered. Hark1

No, No! She seldom cried! God, not too far
For her to see, this first night, light a aster!

And, in the morning, when she first woke up,
I always kissed her on the left cheek where
The dimple was. And oh, I wet the brush!
It made it easier to curl her hair!
Just - just tomorrow morning, God, I pray,
When she wakes up, do things for her my way!

It's from a book of prayers I have, written by an American called Violet Alleyn Storey

This from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
?But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy??

Bye Bye Baby by Janet and Alan Ahlberg...about a baby with no Mother...

he goes looking for a Mummy...and wanders miles picking up a teddy and a hen along the way...eventually he gets tired and falls over and wails...and it begins to rain and then around the corner came..."A Mummy! And she was pushing a pram...and he told her, "I am a little baby with no Mummy...will you be my Mummy? And she says "I am a Mummy with no baby!"

Gosh that's a sad but happy one....they go home together.

Has anyone mentioned the first line of Peter Pan yet?

"All children, except one, grow up." It makes me cry every time because it isn't true. They don't all grow up.

Lines from Christmas songs can have me weeping too. "Someday soon we all may be together, if the fates allow...so have yourself a Merry little Christmas now" and "Sleep in heavenly peace..." get me every time I hear them. They always have.

But O Holy Night is the one that really makes me cry right from the very start. "O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining, it is the night of our dear Saviours birth..."

Our daughter was born while this song played on the hospital radio. She died shortly afterwards and this song was probably the only beautiful thing she ever knew in her life.

I've set myself off now, I'm crying just typing the words out. Whenever I hear the song I think of her and replace "Saviour" with "daughter" in my head. I'm glad though that she heard it.