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.

[PaperSeagull]

Charlotte's Web: "No one was with her when she died."

Understood Betsy: "She had said her 'Now I Lay Me' every night since she could remember, but she had never prayed till she lay there with her face on the rock, saying over and over, 'Oh, God, please, please, please make Mr. Pond adopt 'Lias."

To Kill a Mockingbird: "Well, it'd be sort of like shootin' a mockingbird, wouldn't it?" and "Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passin'."

From a wonderful book called Among Schoolchildren: "Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy in the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done."

[happygirl87]

Theres a war poem that makes me weep, by a you g woman whose husband was killed in service:

"We planned to shake the world together, you and I
Being young, and very wise
[...]
We shall never shake the world together, you and I
For you gave your life away"

Also Christina Rosetti
"If by chance you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve
For if the darkness and corruption leave a vestige of the thought that once I had
Better by far you should forget me for a while
Than that you should remember and be sad"

[iliketea]

The winnie the pooh ones make me cry.

As does the whole of The Velveteen Rabbit - i bought it for dd as it's one of my very very favourite stories and have never read it to her as I start sobbing at the beginning and cry the whole way through!

Weirdly, i don't cry at much but the velveteen rabbit gets me every time!

[Greythorne]

Folkgirl


Yes, yes, that's not quite in the same league as Owl Babies. Utterly devastating.

[topbannana]

Not one who is prone to too much emotion while reading but, having been heavily invested in the Harry Potter series I almost had a breakdown at,
"Albus Severus Potter. You were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew"

[MexicanHat]

Not the book but Les Miserables musical/film

Cosette: You will live, Papa you're going to live. It's too soon too soon to say goodbye.

Jean Valjean: Yes Cosette, forbid me now to die I'll obey. I,lll try.

It really gets to me. I think about my own Dad and how I will cope when he isn't here anymore.

[PiddlingWeather]

Oh sod you all, I had a glass of wine with my Sunday dinner, read this thread, and now I'm weeping into a tea towel.

[scampidoodle]

A story rather than a book, The Little Match Girl , almost at the end when she dies - the version I had said "her grandmother took her up to paradise where the cold and hunger and fear could never hurt her again". It makes me cry just thinking about it.

[PolkadotsAndMoonbeams]

Les Miserables, when Eponine dies, and she says to Marius "I believe I was a little bit in love with you".

And the first time I read Mole's Sunrise, the ending "Mole was blind, but at last he'd seen the sunrise. He didn't see it with his eyes; he saw it in his mind. And it was even more beautiful than anyone could imagine" gave me a huge lump in my throat.

[saadia]

What a lovely thread, the one that springs to my mind is the end of The Snail and the Whale, "and on crawled snail after snail after snail".

Also was reading the dcs a book called "Blue Sky Freedom" about apartheid era South Africa and there were numerous times when I couldn't go on and dcs had to take over.

[PolkadotsAndMoonbeams]

iliketea I was given The Velveteen Rabbit to read when I was babysitting.

I knew I'd be a wreck, but "Mummy never reads it to me" so I felt like I should. I know exactly why Mummy never reads it to you! I didn't exactly read it to her either, I sobbed it.

[Quangle]

Lovely thread.

Love Margaret Forster who doesn't get anywhere near enough coverage.

And "I am David" - I must have read it twenty times. Total heartbreaker.

We also love all AA Milne poems. They are just perfect about small children.

[MamaMary]

Was going to quote Cathy's words to Nelly about her love for Heathcliffe, but mothersapron already did.

Folkgirl, that quote from the Auschwitz account is devastating.

The Seamus Heaney poem is also quietly tragic, isn't it?

Wilfred Owen poem (last lines):

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

[LauraChant]

LydiasLunch Sorry for the late reply, yes it is. I love that book. Keep trying to persuade people to call their sons Sorensen but no luck so far...

[VerySmallSqueak]

Oh Folkgirl that would make anyone stop and think.

There is more preceding my quote, making it so much harder to read,but tbh I think it's just too distressing for some to want to read unknowingly.
They're words that'll stay with me,for sure.

[LauraChant]

Oh yes to "dulce et decorum est", we had to read that aloud in school for an English oral test, quite hard to do.

And yes to the Busman's Honeymoon line and Some Dogs Do.

[TheOriginalSteamingNit]

There's a Julia Donaldson picture book about paper dolls, can't remember the name. But I heard dd's friend read it at her father's funeral, and hope I never do again.

[MamaMary]

Oooh, just remembered a lovely line from Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy)

And at home by the fire, whenever you look up there I shall be? and whenever I look up, there will be you.
-Gabriel Oak?

[Whyamihere]

'Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart and the fall through the air of a true wise friend called Piggy' from Lord of the Flies.
For some reason these lines have always stayed with me, I think because they made such an impression on me when I read them

[RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. Bloody love Lord of the Flies. heartbreaking. Simon. :(

[NeoMaxiZoomDweebie]

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in
reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving
how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the
world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no,
nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem
to say so.

That KILLS me when Withnail does it in Withnail and I. So sad...so ironic that this struggling actor gives a killer performance in a rain washed London park with no audience but those wolves...

[TroublesomeEx]

VerySmallSqueak yes, there's more before my quote too, nothing major, just setting the scene and giving more of a context. Those couple of paragraphs describing people in their last hours of freedom, humanity and (often) life are just so utterly devastating, as MamaMary said.

It's the final line in my quote that gets me the most. Because it's true. We would - every single one of us.

And the fact that there are people around the world today experiencing similar levels of desperation and they don't feel any differently either...

[VerySmallSqueak]

Absolutely, FolkGirl.