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?

darumafan His journal, that simple sentence, life is so unbearable sometimes. x

“We each owe a death, there are no exceptions, I know that, but sometimes, oh God, the Green Mile is so long”

Stephen King - The Green Mile

I sobbed through the book but was an inconsolable wreck at this.

reallybadidea I'm re-reading Wolf Hall right now and completely agree with the bits you mentioned on Cromwell's family dying of the sweating sickness. The death of Grace is particularly moving, I think:

Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. It had always seemed impossible to him that some act of his gave her life, some unthinking thing that he and Liz did, on some immemorable night. They had intended the name to be Henry for a boy, Katherine for a girl... But when he had seen her, swaddled, beautiful, finished and perfect, he had said quite another thing, and Liz had agreed. We cannot earn grace. We do not merit it.

'It could be,' said Albert quietly. 'You're right David, it could be him. It sounds like him even. But there's one way I know to be sure,' and he untied my rope and pulled the halter off my head. The he turned and walked away to the gateway before facing me, cupping his hands to his lips and whistling. It was his own whistle, the same low, stuttering whistle he had used to call me when we were walking out together back at home on the farm all those long years before. Suddenly there was no longer any pain in my leg, and I trotted easily towards him and buried my nose in his shoulder.

'It's him, David,' Albert said, putting his arms around my neck and hanging onto my mane. 'It's my Joey. I've found him. He's come back to me just like I said he would.'

War Horse - cried my way through the whole book.

oh God, this thread has me in bits. Some wonderful, wonderful writing in this world.

This one from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

"Even after all this time?"
"Always"

The last book I cried at was The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O Farrell, I don’t want to post spoilers but it is a mother talking about her son in the most heartbreaking way.

After you've gone by Maggie O'Farrell.
I don't have a quote but all the way through she is knitting a scarf and you don't know who for then realise it's for her husband who died. So sad. She's a wonderful writer.

Thus thread should be in classics.

chips - when she's in the sea ?

Some amazing pieces on here. Some writers really know how to get us going.

I think insane further up someone mentioned 'Once Were Giants'. Dd2 got this in her bookbug bag and I struggle to read it even now. It's still one of her favourites and she is 9! She always says it doesn't sound the same when she reads it, it has to be mummy I think she likes to see me cry

The poor little Swallow grew colder and colder, but he would not leave the Prince, he loved him too well. He picked up crumbs outside the baker’s door when the baker was not looking and tried to keep himself warm by flapping his wings. But at last he knew that he was going to die. He had just strength to fly up to the Prince’s shoulder once more. “Good-bye, dear Prince!” he murmured, “Will you let me kiss your hand?” “I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow,” said the Prince, “you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you.” “It is not to Egypt that I am going,” said the Swallow. “I am going to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?” And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet. At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two.

Don't know if anyone's mentioned the happy Prince yet but I find it utterly devastating!!

I was struggling with a bereavement and there was a line in a book 'we all leave each other in the end' about relationships and death.

Found it oddly comforting.

And a book based on the concept that time is based on a möbius strip, so it goes and round rather than being linear. One of the paragraphs in it is something like:

Have you ever stayed in a place where you wanted someone who didn't want you? Well don't, never do. Get out. Don't stay in a place where you want someone who doesn't want you. Get out as quickly as you can and don't look back. That's all I can say, that's all you can do.

I remember sobbing at a history book once, Somme by Lyn McDonald. It was a quotation or interview with a man who had been a soldier at the Somme when he was maybe late teens/early twenties. He was home on leave and his mother filled the tin bath in front of the fire and scrubbed his back for him the way she did when he was a little boy, and he was so comforted by it and she was so distraught with worry for him.

I must have read that 15 years ago and it has totally stayed with me.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

Bleak but beautiful.

Another couple:
I like to think that nothing's final, and that everyone gets to be together even when it looks like they don't, that it all works out even when all the evidence seems to say something else, that you and I are always young in the woods, and that I'll see you sometime again, even if it's not with any kind of eyes I know of or understand. I wouldn't be surprised if that is the way things go after all - that all things end happy.
Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

And from the same book:
Sometimes love means not being able to bear seeing the one you love the way they are, when they’re not what you hoped for them.

For anyone whose heart breaks over dogs or animals in book - please don't read Lily and the Octopus. There aren't any quotes that make sense out of context but I basically sobbed the entire way through

chips - when she's in the sea ?

Yes! That whole bit made me wail.

I loved War Horse too PP, wept from start to finish!

No matter what Deborah Gilori made me cry and cry when I had my son and Beautiful Boy about a fathers heartbreak of his sons decent into addiction and the last chapter of a boy made of blocks about boy with autism I cried in an airport reading that one !

Tearing up at some of these. Especially the 'last baby' quote.

Children's book I tear up is the baby book '10 little fingers and 10 little toes'
'And the next baby born was truly divine, a sweet little child who was mine, all mine'

The God of Small Things remains one of my favourite books, so poetic. It's not a tear-inducing quote but one I remember:

'If you are happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count? Estha asked. "Does what count?" "The happiness does it count?". She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff. Because the truth is, that only what counts, counts.'

MeatandPotato - glad I'm not the only one. I started reading it in the lounge, i.e. In the same room as DP, but disappeared into the bedroom within the first few pages and stayed there til I was finished the book, as I knew he wouldn't understand me sobbing all the way through. My cat came and joined me and was allowed to stay - she's less judgemental about these things!

In Stephen King's Pet Sematary when you first learn that the little boy is going to die. It's a happy scene of the Dad & little Gage flying a kite together, and it's just suddenly dropped into the text. Something along the lines of "and Gage, who now have less than three months to live..".

It's just such an awful shock. But to be fair it is a Stephen King book so I shouldn't have expected it to end happily

Am I allowed to share a short poem here? It's "The Two-Headed Calf", by Laura Gilpin, and it doesn't matter how many times I read it, that last line always gets me.

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

I couldn't copy and paste so screen shot it instead, this never fails to make me cry. Going to have it read at my funeral!

Yes, that is beautiful, Haggischucker.