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.

"All the animals took up the cry of 'Get out Boxer,get out!' But the van was already gathering speed and drawing away from them.It was uncertain whether Boxer had understood what Clover had said.But a moment later his face disappeared from the window and there was the sound of a tremendous drumming of hoofs inside the van.He was trying to kick his way out.The time had been when a few kicks from Boxer's hoofs would have smashed the van to matchwood.But alas!his strength had left him;and in a few moments the sound of drumming hoofs grew fainter and died away."

Later it goes on to say:
"Boxer was never seen again."

from Animal Farm by George Orwell.

“And after a long time the boy came back again.
"I am sorry, Boy," said the tree, "but I have nothing left to give you-
My apples are gone."
"My teeth are too weak for apples," said the boy.
"My branches are gone," said the tree.
"You cannot swing on them-"
"I am too old to swing on branches," said the boy.
"My trunk is gone," said the tree.
"You cannot climb-"
"I am too tired to climb," said the boy.
"I am sorry," sighed the tree.
"I wish that I could give you something... but I have nothing left. I am an old stump. I am sorry..."
"I don't need very much now," said the boy, "just a quiet pleace to sit and rest. I am very tired."
"Well," said the tree, straightening herself up as much as she could,
"well, an old stump is a good for sitting and resting. Come, Boy, sit down. Sit down and rest."
And the boy did.
And the tree was happy.”
? Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree
Has me sobbing every.single.time

I might have missed it, but we cannot have this thread without Harry Potter 7 "after all this time?" "always."

When Odysseus arrives home in The Odyssey it says of Penelope "her white arms around his neck never quite let go" - I had to read it in front of my classics class and nearly fell apart.

Villette "But solitude is sadness" "Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heart-break." It seems I owe a lot to my A Level teachers.

Also, not quite a teary moment, but in Perks of Being a Wallflower "So this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be." They are the words I spent my whole adolescence searching for.

Donein I have just this second gone to look for my copy of The Giving Tree, because this thread is making me want it.

Oh good grief, I'm in bed with my 11 month old, trying not to wake her by sobbing. Especially KD0's post.

I can't find a particular line right now but How To Talk To A Widower made me cry, every single time

For me it's a book called ten little fingers and ten little toes.

It's a toddler book and it takes you to children all round the world saying they have ten little fingers and ten little toes. There is a line which says

'The next baby born was truly devine a sweet little child that was mine all mine'.

It chokes me up every time

Yy to lots of these. I howled at the end of The Boy In The Stripped Pyjamas. Can't remember the line.

And on a plane I read the appendix to Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise and the air steward came to check on me I was sobbing that much.

Mid term break I remember the bit about men shaking his hand and saying sorry for your trouble - a typical under-stated N Irish response to tragedy!

The Fault in Our Stars, John Green.

I can't remember exactly, but when the narrator is so ill that they fear she won't recover, but she overhears her mum sob something like...

"But I won't be a mom anymore"

I wasn't even pg when I read that. Now I have a son, and I'm welling up thinking about it.

I just Googled Goodbye Mog to see if it was the same Mog as Mog the Forgetful Cat and even the synopsis made me cry!

Maryz Greythorne posted the entire poem further up the thread. Heartbreaking.

"She gazed at the sky, the sea, the land,
The waves and the caves and the golden sand,
She gazed and gazed amazed by it all,
And said to the whale, I feel so small"

I am always very moved by the All The World's A Stage soliloquay from As You Like It, which is one of my favourite Shakespeares.

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

I find it incredibly moving, perhaps because I come from a theatrical family. It would make a poignant funeral reading imo.

My best friend was with a friend of hers in hospital the night before he died of Aids in 1986. He was one of the first to die of the disease in this country. She read him Winnie The Pooh stories.

From "The Baby who Wouldn't Go to Bed"

Then the Mother picked up the Baby with one arm, and pushed the car with the other... (She was a very strong Mother).

I think this makes me cry because I had a rough start with DD and didn't feel like a strong mother. The mother is just doing what every mother would do and what has to be done. You have no choice but to seem like a strong mother to your children even when you don't feel strong.

OMG I didn't know Mog died (my mum did not buy that book!) I loved the series as a child, I was already in tears reading this thread but now I'm inconsolable

"Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big, I mean - except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be."

• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Gets me every time.

The bit that always gets me with Lord Of The Rings is the bit where Frodo tries to attack Sam because he is so overcome by the evil of the ring and Sam says;

'It's me. It's your Sam. Don't you know your Sam?' and he snaps him out of it.

"I am glad that you are here with me, Sam. Here, at the end of all things."

Such a good line that he repeats it when the scene picks up again!

"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"

Oh. I haven't even read that book but I am sobbing!

So many of these.

Your father's passing

Not the bit above quoted from The Children of Green Knowe, but when Tolly is told they all died of plague.

Yes, Black Beauty and the death of Helen Burns. Yes to Kent.

The bit in the Pilgrim's Progress when the trumpets sounded for him on the other side, where it is death not love.

Also, Isaac Walton's ending of the life of John Donne

" But I shall see him reanimated."

All of I heard the Owl Call My Mame ( can't recall who it's by) and most of Sick Heart River by Buchan.

Am now going to weep myself to sleep!