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.

I don't cry at books. But was very hot behind the eyes at "It is a far, far, better thing I do...". I was on a train at the time.

I was on a train when I read the bit where Rue dies in The Hunger Games. I think dh wanted the ground to swallow him up!

?She walked rapidly in the thin June sunshine towards the worst horror of all?

The final line from Brighton Rock. It's the words 'rapidly' and 'thin' somehow that really get me

This is a poem, but the final lines make me cry every time. I made one of the students read it aloud when I had to teach it to my AS Lit class when I went back to work after having DD.

'Demeter' by Carol Ann Duffy

Where I lived ? winter and hard earth.
I sat in my cold stone room
choosing tough words, granite, flint,

to break the ice. My broken heart ?
I tried that, but it skimmed,
flat, over the frozen lake.

She came from a long, long way,
but I saw her at last, walking,
my daughter, my girl, across the fields,

In bare feet, bringing all spring?s flowers
to her mother?s house. I swear
the air softened and warmed as she moved,

the blue sky smiling, none too soon,
with the small shy mouth of a new moon.

Oh, I had to read Charlotte's Web as the class book to my class.

The line "Nobody was with her when she died" made me choke up when reading to my 10 and 11 year olds.

TheUglyFuckling, I bought my dh a sun dial with that line inscribed!

From the book "Chosen by a horse"

"I had lost love before, but even worse, I had lost the memory of love, all traces that it had ever existed"

And
"I looked down at the huge unmoving body and felt a moment of pure horror. What had we done? I wanted her to finish her apple, to have her get up. I wanted her back"

So many wonderful quotes here. And sorry to so many of you for your losses

"A mother with a baby, just like him" totally ambushed me the first time I read it and I would cry now I don't doubt (tho there is little demand here for Peepo now, sadly).

I also well up at "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (Gatsby)

Such a lovely thread, am sitting here in tears and I should have gone to bed ages ago!

I cry at all sorts of things but the only book I haven't been able to read to my dd was one we got from the library and when I read it for the first time it was about a little girl and her best friend a cat and the girl had to move to the city and leave the cat behind with her aunt and could only come and see it once a year and they always remembered they were friends - absolutely slayed me! i remember dd looking at me to see why I had stopped reading!

Monkey Puzzle

Butterfly is explaining to Monkey why she keeps picking the wrong animals that maybe his lost mummy

She says...

"I didn't know, I couldn't you see.... None of my babies look like me"

i always seem to manage to get something in my eye that makes my voice wobble at this point in the book

Remember, by Christina Rossetti. It's that she starts by asking for remembrance but then finishes by suggesting she would be better forgotten for the sake of happiness; that the remembrance she wants will only bring sadness.

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

'The true measure of a life is not its length but the fullness with which it is lived' spoken of Author Maria Houston's three year old daughter, Hannah.

Also 'I'm stick man, i'm stick man, i'm stick man, that's me... and I want to go back to the family tree'.

I well up every time I read this to my children. Especially in the lead up to Christmas.

Dun bicoz we are to menny.

I can't remember the spelling (or indeed the exact wording) but this is the note left by the children of Jude the Obscure.

I know it's already been mentioned but worth repeating - I first read Goodbye Mog as an adult (found it in the library) and burst into tears right there in public, without a child with me.

'Mog was tired.
Mog was dead tired.
Her head was dead tired.
Her paws were dead tired.
Even her tail was dead tired.
Mog thought "I want to sleep forever".
And so she did.'

And the bit at the end when she flies into the sun. I'm blubbing even thinking about it.

Oh my gosh LauraChant I was just about to post that. I use to lose it completely when we got to that line. To be honest I found the whole book quite difficult to get through without ending up in tears.

I have a huge lump in my throat now!

The end of 'The boy in the striped pyjamas' when Bruno and Shmuel are in the gas chamber, holding on to each others hand makes me bawl uncontrollably.

There is also a paragraph in the Lovely Bones, where Susie is remembering building the ships in the bottles with her father that brings a lump to my throat, she says something about holding it in her hands and the whole world in the bottle depending on her.

The whole of 'Before I die' makes me cry too, especially when Tessa is asking her nurse if dying will hurt.

This is the saddest book in the world. Pookie is a rabbit with wings, who is adopted by a girl called Belinda. One day Pookie gets captured by the circus, and there's a bit where he's flying around his cage saying "I'd really like to go home now..."
Waahhhh

Today,although it's not a line in the book,may I also mention Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' speech....

theoatmeal.com/comics/dog_paradox

"He is my best friend, and I am his, but he will go to his grave never having known my name".

From the Road:

?You have my whole heart. You always did.?

?What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.?

From "The Fault in Our Stars"

"I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful."

Oh, The Road. I read that quite recently. I like to re-read books, but I can never read that again.

I read it in France. Bawled my eyes out on a tram and had to explain to some lovely French lady what I was upset about blush

Also this by Kurt Vonnegut:

"When the last living thing
Has died on account of us,
How poetical it would be
If Earth could say,
In a voice floating up
Perhaps
From the floor
Of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here."