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.

"These are just the... the unfound" when she could speak again "from the whole war?"
The man shook his head. "Just from these fields"
Elizabeth sat on the step. "No-one told me. My God no-one told me"

from Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes.

I read these lines for the first time at Thiepval at 18. They make me sob every single time.

I remember reading a book as a teenager that has always stayed with me. About a boy and his younger brother surviving a nuclear attack. It goes on to describe how they get by day to day. The younger brother dies from radiation sickness and they bury him. I'm pretty certain the book was called brother, in the ground. I know it's a bit of a give away but it wasn't until I got to that part in the book and they talk about laying him in the ground that I got the significance of the title. I know I sobbed when I got there.

I think you mean Brother in the land.

Asheth, that most definitely catches in my throat.

Folkgirl, I can't stop the tears after reading your quote. It reminded me of a bit in 'Charlotte Grey' which has me weeping for half a day. I can't find it now so i'll just describe it. When Andre and Jacob get on the train to the concentration camp with the other children (adults being left behind) one of the boys sees an adult staring with such intensity at another child that he thinks the look is full of hatred. Then he realises that the parent is trying fiercely to imprint that moment in their memory so as never to forget their child.

Yes you're right. I was just coming back on to correct myself. It's brother in the land.

Damn you lot, i need a new box of tissues now....

I Struggle reading The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince. I Sob at Hans Anderson's Little Match Girl and also (I don't think it's been mentioned) the ORIGINAL version of The Little Mermaid. Not the bastardised Disney version (That makes me cry for a quite different reason.)

I have a book I used to read the children called The Mousehole Cat which I had a catch in my throat when I got to the end.

I had to scroll fast past Mid-Term Break. That last line breaks me every single time.

I'm sure there are others, mostly childrens books. Fortunately I'm not able to think of them offhand right now ;)

There is a bit in Jilly Cooper's Pandora where she quotes: 'Do not weep, Little Dog - at the Resurrection thou too shall have a golden tail'. Makes me HOWL.

I also start sobbing when Dobby dies and barely recover by the end of Deathly Hallows - there are about six snorting snotty moments there, even though I have read it fifteen times.

I also struggle with the end of Of Mice and Men, which is a bugger as I have to read it out loud every single sodding year..

I am sobbing reading these. Yy to Oscar Wilde's fairy tales, especially The Selfish Giant: '"Who hath dared to wound thee?" cried the Giant;' always sets me off. Actually it doesn't; I'll have been crying from about the second paragraph in anticipation of the ending.

Found it:

Andre heard his name and moved with Jacob towards the bus. From the other side of the courtyard, from windows open on the dawn, a shower of food was thrown towars them by women wailing and calling out their names, though none of the scraps reached as far as the enclosure.

Andre looked up, and in a chance angle of light he saw a woman's face in which the eyes were fixed with terrible ferocity on a child beside him. Why did she stare ass thought she hated him? Then it came to Andre that she was not looking in hatred, but had kept her eyes so intensely open in order to fix the picture of her child in her mind. She was looking to remember, for ever.

Gertrude. Why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet. "Seems," madam? Nay, it is; I know not "seems."
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
Cue bubbling wreck of teacher at the front of the class. Every bloody time.
And my son's book about a little robin that gives away all his vests to other needy animals. Santa rescues him and Mrs Clause knits him a new red vest. I always feel the need to do Santa's voice in a Welsh accent, which makes me think of my much loved Grandpa...I now have something in my eye too.

Oh god Monroe. There is a line in brother in the land where someone is pregnant and the sister is asked if she is hoping for a boy or a girl.

She replies 'I hope it is a boy or a girl'.

We did it in year 7 at school which was 20 odd years ago and it haunts me. Especially as the baby was stillborn and affected by the radiation.

Don't know about catch in the throat, Notmore.
That actually hurt in my chest.

Notmoreschoolholidays That people could, and can still, inflict such suffering on their fellow humans is shameful.

froubylou that's a bit of a shocker for year 7 isn't it?

It's a very chilling book through and through.

Just read your quote Notmore

I am now at the point where I'e taught M&M so many bloody times that I can get through it without crying. :)

properly crying now!

One that sets me off is Caliban in the Tempest "When I woke, I cried to dream again" - think I read that at a "difficult" time and it was so perfect at summing things up. It's really stayed with me.

I really shouldn't have started reading this thread. I am in bits especially at the Seamus Heaney poem. It's funny - I learned that poem in school for my Junior Cert (many moons ago) and thought it was sad but nothing more. But now, it just makes me bawl because it makes me think of my little godson who passed away 2 years ago. Completely different circumstances but still...

Reading the Hunger Games, I burst into tears when Rue died.

John Proctor - ?How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!? Weep.

Oh yes to all of these. And I love The Children of Green Knowe too!

I read the account of the battle of the Somme on a long bus journey. Had to bite the collar of my coat so I didn't sob like a baby.

It was this bit....

'Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and town where the telegrams would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers? shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put with only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.'

And the priest who is watching the horror unfold.....

'He fell to his knees but did not pray?Horrocks pulled the silver cross from his chest and hurled it from him?Jack knew what had died in him.'

Anything about war gets me. I don't know how I held it together when my class studied WW2.... One child brought in letters written by his great grandad following D Day, France, 1944. I read a beautiful, very moving poem he had written to his wife to a silent, mesmerised bunch of 8 yr olds. (Thankfully, he survived the experience....the great grandad that is, not the kids listening to the poem!!)

It gave me nightmares very. We also watched a film about nuclear war filmed in Sheffield which is the next city to us. Can't remember the name of it.

But was a baptism of fire to big school.

We also visited the plague village in Derbyshire. This was in year 5.

No wonder I worried a lot as a child.

Willsing- That King line is a shocker especially when he talks of the wind bloom in his baby son's cheeks from the kite flying and "Kite Flying Daddy. Kite flying in the sky".

Nevil Shute's 'On The Beach' is a killer book. Basically they all die from radiation sickness and people have to administer euthanasia to their babies and children. Terrible. My Father told me about it and said he read it with tears pouring down his face.

I know, I wish I hadn't looked it up now I first read it when ds2 was newborn and i couldn't get it out of my mind (or my chest IYKWIM) for days. The Caliban quote also resonates with me, I can very much identify with that sense of anguish.

One line that sticks with me comes from an unexpected source. A recent Jack Reacher book where he and his brother go to France to visit their dying mother. She's got cancer, invites them to visit to say goodbye as she's dying. Reacher says something about her not getting treatment - does she not want to stick around - but she says to him 'no-one ever sees the end'. And that idea of life being a movie that you never see the end of the story of life brought a real lump to my throat as I looked at my ten month old daughter and realised I wouldn't see her whole life, as my deceased grandad didn't see her, and how my own mum and dad wouldn't be around forever to see how things turn out. Lee Child isn't one for fabulous prose but that image has really stuck.

"Passions beat around Simon on the mountaintop with awful wings." Lord of the Flies.