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.

[SPBisResisting]

"And all the cars had their lights on" in tiger who came to tea

[Winnicas]

From One Day, "and then Emma Morely dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever"

There's just something about the finality that breaks my heart.

[LydiasLunch]

LauraChant is your name from The Changeover by Margaret Mahy? I love her books.

[moreyear]

Oh you will love them oinkling - especially The Selfish Giant, The Nightingale and the Rose and The Happy Prince.

I think what you wrote about Woolf and cummings is very true.

[minsmum]

I found a copy of Oscar Wilde's fairy tales as a gift for a child being born but they never got it because I couldn't bear to part with it

[JuliaScurr]

Lifeissweet
you made me cry

[Cantdothisagain]

The Matthew line in Anne of Green Gables here as well. Loved that book...

[SoleSource]

Chub i'm going to buy the book too. The ending line got me :( because for me it is so true.

[EnjoyEverySandwich]

I am not going looking for it but in Stephen King's Dark Tower







the death of Oy

[magimedi]

The last line from "The Museum of Innocence" by Orhan Pamuk:

"Let everyone know, I lived a very happy life."


When I read that book for the first time I howled when I finished it.


And yes to The Pursuit of Love - I can't count the times I've re-read it.

[Greythorne]

Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

[bassetfeet]

That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all, and it was only a couple of weeks since I?d lost him. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy, and he'd wave, maybe even call. The fantasy never got beyond that I didn't let it and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn't sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.?
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

This tears me up every time. Very close to a personal memory and time in my life .

Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go .

[Capitola]

The Selfish Giant -

'And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."
And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.'

It kills me, every time.

[LadyClariceCannockMonty]

Just the title of AA Milne's 'When We Were Very Young'.

Also from Pooh, 'feeling all sunny and careless'.

'Nothing gold can stay' from The Outsiders (for some reason, more moving than the original Robert Frost poem).

Bloody Neruda destroys me. Everything he wrote. But particularly this, from 'The Dead Woman':

'if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping'

[MissMarplesBloomers]

Ok to really finish us all off.......

But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that
enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

Sorry......

[Armi]

You complete gits; am now a total wreck.

I always have a good howl at 'Stand up - your father is passing.' in To Kill A Mockingbird. And in Behind The Scenes At The Museum by Kate Atkinson - the narrator Ruby is speaking about the concept of having a bottom drawer in preparation for marriage or for keeping precious things safe. She says something like, 'Now I know what I would put into my bottom drawer - I would put my sisters.' Which so accurately expresses how I feel about my sisters that I'm weeping like a fool now whilst typing this!

[EweHaveGoatToBeKiddin]

Another AA Milne quote. I love this:

?What day is it?"
"It's today," squeaked Piglet.
"My favorite day," said Pooh.

[picnicbasketcase]

The Seamus Heaney poem is heartbreaking

[Fillyjonk75]

I don't really remember lines/scenes from books very well, though I do remember Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin growing up and going to school.

I am reading The Light Between Oceans at the moment though and there is some really lovely prose. I have the feeling it's realy going to touch my heart.

"Oh little one," Isabel crooned, "poor, poor little one," as the baby nuzzled her face in towards her breast. Tom could hear tears in her voice, and the memory of an invisible presence hung in the air between them.

[SweetestThing]

this poem gets me every time

[RoastedCouchPotatoes]

"One day I gave Clifford a bath. And I combed his hair and took him to the dog show. I'd like to say Clifford won first prize...but he didn't. I don't care. You can keep all your small dogs. You can keep all your black, white, brown, and spotted dogs. I'll keep Clifford...Wouldn't you?'

[SoleSource]

At the end of the book the writer states

Even though I hadn't seen him in more than ten years, I know I will miss him forever.

I never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve.

Jesus, does anyone?

[RoastedCouchPotatoes]

"'You must be a friend,' said Corduroy. 'I've always wanted a friend.'

'Me too,' said Lisa, and gave him a big hug."

[RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie]

The Dark Tower. This one: :(

Then he closed the blue hood around the boy's face against the rain of earth that must follow.