In the world of literature, a book's final line holds the power to linger in the reader's mind long after the last page has been turned. These memorable closing lines can encapsulate the themes, evoke powerful emotions, or provide a striking conclusion to a narrative journey. They are carefully crafted words that leave a lasting impression, sometimes leaving us pondering, sometimes offering closure. Dive into our curated collection of the top 69 closing lines that have defined literary masterpieces and captured the imaginations of readers across generations. Whether you're a bibliophile seeking nostalgia or a curious newcomer eager to explore, these iconic endings are sure to inspire and provoke thought.
1. “It's better to burn out than to fade away.” - Neil Young
2. “From too much love of livingFrom hope and fear set free,We thank with brief thanksgivingWhatever gods may beThat no life lives for ever;That dead men rise up never;That even the weariest riverWinds somewhere safe to sea.Then star nor sun shall waken,Nor any change of light:Nor sound of waters shaken,Nor any sound or sight:Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,Nor days nor things diurnal;Only the sleep eternalIn an eternal night.” - Algernon Charles Swinburne
3. “My troubles are all over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees.” - Anna Sewell
4. “I keep turning over new leaves, and spoiling them, as I used to spoil my copybooks; and I make so many beginnings there never will be an end. (Jo March)” - Louisa May Alcott
5. “Seek for the Sword that was brokenIn Imladris it dwells;There shall be counsels takenStronger than Morgul-spells.There shall be shown a tokenThat Doom is near at hand,For Isuldur's Bane shall waken,And the halfling forth shall stand.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
6. “I am an old man, and I am dying...Will you remember me, Jacob?"I promise, one day, I will join you, Mr. Gold."Mr. Gold's laughter sounded like a trumpet and brought light to the corners of the room.” - Noah BenShea
7. “In the end we're all just chalk lines on the concrete Drawn only to be washed away For the time that I've been given I am what I am” - Five Finger Death Punch
8. “And I know I’ve lost.Everything is lost.Everything is over.“As the newly appointed President of this fair planet of ours,” the Mayor says, holding out his hands as if to show me the world for the first time,” let me be the very first to welcome you to its new capital city.”“Todd?” Viola whispers, her eyes closed.I hold her tightly to me.“I’m sorry,” I whisper to her. “I’m so sorry.”We’ve run right into a trap.We’ve run right off the end of the world.“Welcome,” says the Mayor,” to the New Prentisstown.” - Patrick Ness
9. “I thought about the screws and their happiness. Maybe they were glad to be free of the eggbeater, to be independent screws, to luxuriate on white trays. It did feel good to see them happy.” - Haruki Murakami
10. “I will fight untill the end” - Breaking Benjamin
11. “When people divide, things end. Therefore: I won't divide because I don't want this to end.” - Daniel C. Tomas
12. “Death isn't the end, it's the beginning.” - Jennifer Love Hewitt
13. “Life's just a bunch of accidents, connected by one perfect end.” - Daniel C. Tomas
14. “I may not have any power over it at the moment, but at some point that must change. I can be very patient. I am the end of all things, nephew mine. I shall be the last. When birth has ended, I wil cut Clotho's cord, and she will be no more. The time will come when every last thread has been measured, and I will snip Lachesis from the great weave. In the end only Death and I will remain. Then I will cut his thread, and it will be me alone. With my last strength I will close the shears on my own life. I am the end of everything, including you.” - Kelly McCullough
15. “No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it” - Karl Popper
16. “The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air.It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies.Its clear tones resound in the placid silence of the winter day, and echo long into the silver-blue serenity of night.The bell can only be seen at the turning of the year, when the days wind down into nothing, and get ready to march out again.When you hear the bell, you feel a tug at your heart.It is your immortal inspiration.” - Vera Nazarian
17. “The world began in hazard and will end in it.” - John Fowles
18. “Full emergency power to the engines. Ram the Blade ship.” - Katherine Alice Applegate
19. “Centuries of fighting, and for what? I say. "Today it ends. I can't live in fear any longer. I've cursed this power. I've both enjoyed and misused it. And I've hidden it away. Now I must try to wield it correctly, to marry it to a purpose and hope that is enough.” - Libba Bray
20. “If she answered, he could not hear it, and he certainly couldn't see her, so he went. First he crawled the rocks one by one, one by one, till his hands touched shore and the nursing sound of the sea was behind him. He felt around, crawled off and then stood up. Breathing heavily with his mouth open he took a few tentative steps. The pebbles made him stumble and so did the roots of trees. He threw out his hands to guide and steady his going. By and by he walked steadier, now steadier. The mist lifted and the trees stepped back a bit as if to make the way easier for a certain kind of man. Then he ran. Lickety-split. Lickety-split. Looking neither to the left nor to the right. Lickety-split. Lickety-split. Lickety-lickety-lickety-split.” - Toni Morrison
21. “At dawn of man, many words of inspiration.At the end, there will be words of revelation.” - Toba Beta
22. “When I buy a new book, I always read the last page first, that way in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.” - Nora Ephron
23. “Chin up, Ferdinand," I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. "What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.” - Louis-Ferdinand Celine
24. “Nothing’s boring if it’s in your soul…” - David Drake
25. “Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.” - Haruki Murakami
26. “The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.” - Darin Strauss
27. “In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night light; she knew of that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way with everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering, "Is this all?” - Thomas Harris
28. “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” - Ralph Ellison
29. “Maggie squeezes my hand. It’s a silent message that everything will be okay. Somehow I believe her. In the end everything will be okay. But hurdles have to be jumped through first.” - Simone Elkeles
30. “Love as much and as hard as you can because one day in your life near the end, you may forget how it truly feels.” - Jeanette Michelle
31. “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” - Herbert Stein
32. “He knew that all the hazards and perils were now drawing together to a point: the next day would be a day of doom, the day of final effort or disaster, the last gasp.” - J. R. R. Tolkien
33. “Life starts from a white hole and ends in a black hole.” - Santosh Kalwar
34. “But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?” - Franz Kafka
35. “Mary believes she was put on earth to bring an end to the living world.”Both Nick and Mikey just stared at her.“What do you mean … end?” asked Mikey.“End means end. Complete and total destruction. She wants to kill everyone and everything. She wants to bring down every building, burn every forest, empty every ocean of life. She wants to turn the earth into a dead planet …” - Neal Shusterman
36. “Well, this is basically the end, so the answers should be in these next few pages. I doubt they will surprise you, but you never know. I don't know how smart or thick you are. You could be Albert Einstein for all I know, or some literary prizewinner, or maybe you're just middle of the road like me.” - Markus Zusak
37. “Slowly, with many lost days, I come back to life.” - Suzanne Collins
38. “I search his eyes for the slightest sign of anything, fear, remorse, anger. But there's only the same look of amusement that ended our last conversation. It's as if he's speaking the words again. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other."He's right. We did.The point of my arrow shifts upward. I release the string. And President Coin collapses over the side of the balcony and plunges to the ground. Dead.” - Suzanne Collins
39. “I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things.Only end them.” - Chuck Palahniuk
40. “To dance to fey music is the beginning of the end.” - Kate McCafferty
41. “And we all end up where we started” - Melina Marchetta
42. “Death. What a brief word for the extinguishing of life. To be no more. To have days cut off and at their end. To never again..........anything.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
43. “Glaring at the Gasman, ter Borcht said, “Your time is coming to an end, youpathetic failure of an experiment. Vhat you say now is how you vill beremembered.”Gazzy’s blue eyes flashed. “Then you can remember me telling you to kissmy-”“Enough!” ter Borcht said.” - James Patterson
44. “And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.” - Erin Morgenstern
45. “You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?” - Julian Barnes
46. “Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true.” - Stephen King
47. “End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
48. “You get use to someone—start to like them, even—and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves.” - Rachel Ward
49. “And then, a strangely comforting thought trickled through me—I had nothing, so I could do anything now. Anything I wanted. I had nothing left to lose.” - Rachel Ward
50. “However cozy things seemed, the facts of life were the same. You couldn't escape death: It would get us all in the end.” - Rachel Ward
51. “The story I am going to tell has more than one beginning and without an end.” - T. Afsin Ilgar
52. “Friends end. But family will stay when your friendship ends” - Misti Hemlock
53. “Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.” - Dejan Stojanovic
54. “Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.” - Dejan Stojanovic
55. “In the end, the world returns to a grain.” - Dejan Stojanovic
56. “t was once famously said that it is as well that wars are so ruinously expensive, else we would never stop fighting them. However well said, it seems also to be endlessly forgotten that, while there may be just wars and unjust wars, there are never any cheap wars.” - Paul Hoffman
57. “The direction you choose to face determines whether you're standing at the end or the beginning of a road.” - Richelle E. Goodrich
58. “Why should I fear death?If I am, then death is not.If Death is, then I am not.Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?Long time men lay oppressed with slavish fear.Religious tyranny did domineer.At length the mighty one of GreeceBegan to assent the liberty of man.” - Epicurus
59. “You act as if I were your enemy.“You are my enemy. You seek to end the things I love.”And is an ending always bad? it asked. Must not all things, even worlds, someday end?“There is no need to hasten that end,” Vin said. “No reason to force it.”All things are subject to their own nature, Vin, Ruin said, seeming to flow around her. She could feel its touch on her—wet and delicate, like mist. You cannot blame me for what I am. Without me, nothing would end. Nothing could end. And therefore, nothing could grow. I am life. Would you fight life itself?Vin fell silent.Do not mourn because the day of this world’s end has arrived, Ruin said. That end was ordained the very day of the world’s conception. There is a beauty in death—the beauty of finality, the beauty of completion.For nothing is truly complete until the day it is finally destroyed.” - Brandon Sanderson
60. “The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?” - Louise Bogan
61. “The end justifies the means. Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to get the right result.” - Sebastian Fitzek
62. “Truth, meanwhile, was a weaponthat even a damaged fist could still grasp and wield. It was a remarkably versatile commodity; it could be traded, or help serve an end, or produce aprofit.” - Mark Allen Smith
63. “Go on till you come to the end; then stop.” - Lewis Carroll
64. “In such a beast as this..." (he means the army)"...it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of bravery or even strength, and once it was down it was finished as a battle.” - Paul Hoffman
65. “In the end, we wear out our worries.” - Stephen King
66. “Good thing or bad thing must surely come to an end but absoluety nothing last forever” - Maryann
67. “When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident.” - Kurt Vonnegut
68. “I've been trying to fit everything in, trying to get to the end before it's too late, but I see now how badly I've deceived myself. Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say. The end is only imaginary, a destination you invent to keep yourself going, but a point comes when you realize you will never get there. You might have to stop, but that is only because you have run out of time. You stop, but that does not mean you have come to an end.” - Paul Auster
69. “Dans chaque fin, il y a un début.” - Libba Bray
