The recent posts about opening a story with a "strong, powerful statement" gave me an idea for a new topic. What are your favourite closing lines of a book? (Though I guess we'll have to be very careful with the quotes on this one; much as I would love to include the twist at the end of Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper, it would spoil it for anyone who has never read the story.)

Anyway, some of my fave ending lines:-

He slept. Although his fate was very strange, he lived. He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply, of itself, as the night comes when day is gone. (Victor Hugo Les Miserables) God, I wept at that epitaph!

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth. (Emily Bronte; Wuthering Heights)

And now, having endeavoured to suit everyone by many weddings, few deaths, and as much prosperity as the eternal fitness of things will permit, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall for ever on the March family. (Louisa M Alcott Jo's Boys - the last of the Little Women series of books)

Maria, brilliant thread- although it brought a lump to my throat to remember the Little Women books... still can't re-read them, too upsetting. I'm willing to bet that East of Eden or Grapes of Wrath have pretty good last lines, but can't lay my hands on them right now..