Most heartbreaking lines from a book ever...

[iamdivergent]

Mine has to be this one...

Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

I cried so hard the three times I've read the book (I haven't put the name of the book in case of spoilers) - what lines got to you?

Just read out the Amos Diggory passage to DD, she's read it but had forgotten it, I'm a soggy mess again. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

‘She still had her mis - and her flute’, Sophie said as she finished talking to me. ‘All these years I have never been able to bear those words. Or bear to speak them, in any language’.

From Sophie’s Choice - a book I can never read again now I have a child. Mis is Polish for ‘teddy’.

Mine is from Evelyn Waughs book A Handful of Dust , I love the book and have read it several times over the years and the part I'm talking about is described in a summary below , Brenda is married to Tony and has a young son called John , which coincidentally is the name of the lover she has taken :

Brenda is in London when John Andrew is killed in a riding accident. On being told that "John is dead", Brenda at first thinks that Beaver has died; on learning that it is her son John, she betrays her true feelings by uttering an involuntary "Thank God!". After the funeral, she tells Tony that she wants a divorce so that she can marry Beaver.

All in all it's a very sad book but that part is particularly cutting .

Floralnomad

The text of that part is set out ^ up thread. It's tragic.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/3062319-most-heart-breaking-lines-from-a-book-ever?pg=11

"Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart."

from Anne Frank's Diary.

I recently picked up "heart in a bottle" as it was an Oliver Jeffers book I hadn't heard of..... omg 3.pages in I couldn't carry on! so beautiful!

I'm a massive Potter fan, and Amos Diggory 'My boy.' kills me. More than 'Always.' I maintain that Cedric's is the worst death, and book 4 is the darkest. 'Kill the spare.' is the end of innocence as far as I am concerned.

As a mum, the end of The House at Pooh Corner is unbearable:
'So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place at the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.'
I cried typing it out.

My worst one is To Kill a Mockingbird, I'm surprised it hasn't been mentioned before (sorry if I missed it).
'Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing.'
It makes me do a big, heaving, sob, every time. And I've read it annually since I was 15, so that's twenty massive gulps and tears.

My

Sorry haven't managed to read the whole thread yet , really don't know how people read some of these depressing books or watch depressing films . I don't like inflicting misery on myself . I only got started with A handful of dust because it was on a school reading list .

If you only read books which have no tragedy, no sadness, no distressing incidents then you are severely limiting what you can read. Also missing out on some great literature.

How true Lois

I can live with that .

Reading should not be a chore, so if someone wants to avoid distressing topics, why should they not?

We all have things we avoid, I think. I cannot read Holocaust fiction. I have read, and will continue to read, survivor testimonies and other factual books about the Holocaust, but I am not going to read fictional books about it. I am very bad at explaining this, so apologies in advance, but I don't see the point (not quite the right word, can't find a better one) of heartbreaking fictional stories when the actual facts are heartbreaking and appalling enough.

The thing is that most of the books we're discussing are not uniformly sad or pessimistic - Wolf Hall, for instance (that I quoted) is absolutely not! It is exciting, wonderfully written, very funny in parts but also does not shy away from the tragic parts of life such as death and loss. Good or great literature reflects life and since illness, injustice and death are part of normal, lived experience, it often features in its pages. (Not always, of course - writers can choose to write comedy and avoid the darker parts of life and these can still be great books - the works of Jane Austen, for example.)

However, in the end, the sad parts of books are a reaffirmation of the best things in life. Grief and loss are simply the other side of love - they are two sides of the same coin. To enjoy one, you have inevitably to endure the other. Great books (or even just good ones) imitate life and allow you to experience the same - full - range of emotions.

I agree totally that reading should not be a chore: I've just abandoned a book after reading about one third and just thinking ' this is slow, more editing was called for'. and I also agree that most books being discussed on here are not totally sad . In fact most are rather uplifting. I can't think of many books which have no elements of sadness or tragedy in them. Can't remember who said it but isn't it the case that the best comedy has an element of pathos in it? I agree that loss and love are 2 sides as are many aspects of life. Some great books were written to show up social ills, so in the end we hopefully behave better towards our fellow humans.

I used to think Beloved was about slavery and emancipation. Then I had children. And now I know it's about motherhood and faithful love. So here are the lines that catch in my throat, from the first understanding and the second.

"It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too."

"Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one."

I'm not talking about sad , I'm talking about books about abuse and the holocaust and such like , we all know it occurs , we all know all about it so that's the type of thing I don't inflict on myself .

Floral - I think this might be a "two kinds of people" thing. Some people find it easier to process historical information as fact/documentary, and some people find it easier to process it through dramatisation.

If you're a fact/documentary person then your imagination and empathy will do the work for you; other people need more immersion so a film like Amistad or Schindler's List does the job.

Yes I suppose it's all horses for courses .

I understand completely what you are saying, Floral - I avoid stories of unmitigated gloom myself! But I think the reason most of the passages on here have resonated with a large number of us is that they are sad passages from otherwise "balanced" books with both light and shade.

Yes what better said

Exactly Better. You expect certain things from Steven King, but sadness isn't one of them.

count

Oh but some of his stuff is heart breaking isnt it

There’s a line in Year of Wonders (by Geraldine Brooks-incredible book about the plague village) which goes something like:

He died quietly, as babies do.

Fucking hell. It’s too much 😥

Yes Rufus, which is the one where the ticking stops? I was discussing it with a friend yesterday, and like a bloody food I started blubbing.

Oh gosh i don't remember

Remind me of vaguely what it says...

"The ticking"
"What ticking?"
"Never mind, it's stopped," he said, and smiled brilliantly.
Then Ralph stopped, too.

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