72 Memorable Closing Quotes

In the world of words, endings often hold the most power. They are the final brushstrokes on the canvas, the closing notes of a symphony, and the words that echo long after you've turned the page. A well-chosen closing quote can encapsulate the essence of a narrative, leave a lasting impression, and inspire reflection. In this curated collection, we've gathered 72 of the most memorable closing quotes, each one chosen for its ability to resonate and provoke thought. Whether you're seeking wisdom, comfort, or inspiration, these closing lines will linger with you, sparking contemplation and perhaps even guiding your own journey of words and ideas. Join us as we explore these profound closings that continue to captivate and endure.

1. “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

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “I will fight untill the end” - Breaking Benjamin

8. “When people divide, things end. Therefore: I won't divide because I don't want this to end.” - Daniel C. Tomas

9. “Death isn't the end, it's the beginning.” - Jennifer Love Hewitt

10. “Life's just a bunch of accidents, connected by one perfect end.” - Daniel C. Tomas

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “The world began in hazard and will end in it.” - John Fowles

15. “Full emergency power to the engines. Ram the Blade ship.” - Katherine Alice Applegate

16. “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

17. “At dawn of man, many words of inspiration.At the end, there will be words of revelation.” - Toba Beta

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Nothing’s boring if it’s in your soul…” - David Drake

21. “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

22. “The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.” - Darin Strauss

23. “...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed.Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.” - Kristin Hannah

24. “The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.” - Ralph Ellison

25. “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

26. “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

27. “Promise me you’ll marry me. Not now. Someday. Because I need to know.”Claire felt a flutter inside, like a bird trying to fly, and a rush of heat that made her dizzy. And something else, something fragile as a soap bubble,and just as beautiful. Joy, in the middle of all this horror and heartbreak.“Yes,” she whispered back. “I promise.”And she kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him, while the sun came up and bathed Morganville in one last, shining day.” - Rachel Caine

28. “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” - Herbert Stein

29. “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

30. “Life starts from a white hole and ends in a black hole.” - Santosh Kalwar

31. “But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?” - Franz Kafka

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Slowly, with many lost days, I come back to life.” - Suzanne Collins

35. “I am Cinna's bird, ignited, flying frantically to escape something inescapable. The feathers of flame that grow from my body. Beating my wings only fans the blaze. I consume myself, but to no end.Finally, my wings begin to falter, I lose height, and gravity pulls me into a foamy sea the color of Finnick's eyes. I float on my back, which continues to burn beneath the water, but the agony quiets to pain. When I am adrift and unable to navigate, that's when they come. The dead.The ones I loved fly as birds in the open sky above me. Soaring, weaving, calling to me to join them. I want so badly to follow them, but the seawater saturates my wings, making it impossible to lift them. The ones I hated have taken to the water, horrible scaled things that tear my salty flesh with needle teeth. Biting again and again. Dragging me beneath the surface.The small white bird tinged in pink dives down, buries her claws in my chest, and tries to keep me afloat."No, Katniss! No! You can't go!"But the ones I hated are winning, and if she clings to me, she'll be lost as well. "Prim, let go!" And finally she does.” - Suzanne Collins

36. “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

37. “I think about going to the lake, but I'm so weak that I barely make it to mymeeting place with Gale. I sit on the rock where Cressida filmed us, but it's too wide without his body beside me.Several times I close my eyes and count to ten, thinking that when I open them, he will have materialized without a sound as he so often did. I have to remind myself that Gale's in 2 with a fancy job, probably kissing another pairof lips.” - Suzanne Collins

38. “As the earth dies your spirit will bloom; as the world fades your soul will rise and glisten. Amongst the dehydrated crevices of a desert earth you will stumble upon your diamonds; in between the dry skulls and cracked bones you will find your sapphires.” - C. JoyBell C.

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. “Every moment was a precious thing, having in it the essence of finality.” - Daphne du Maurier

43. “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

44. “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

45. “Pale sky, white land; like somewhere past the end of the world” - Rinsai Rossetti

46. “At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.” - Warsan Shire

47. “And there are really never endings, happy or otherwise.” - Erin Morgenstern

48. “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

49. “Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true.” - Stephen King

50. “End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

51. “You get use to someone—start to like them, even—and they leave. In the end, everyone leaves.” - Rachel Ward

52. “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

53. “We all know we're one day closer to the end when we wake up in the morning. We just kid ourselves that it's not happening.” - Rachel Ward

54. “The story I am going to tell has more than one beginning and without an end.” - T. Afsin Ilgar

55. “Friends end. But family will stay when your friendship ends” - Misti Hemlock

56. “Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.” - Dejan Stojanovic

57. “Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.” - Dejan Stojanovic

58. “In the end, the world returns to a grain.” - Dejan Stojanovic

59. “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

60. “The direction you choose to face determines whether you're standing at the end or the beginning of a road.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

61. “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

62. “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

63. “The end justifies the means. Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing to get the right result.” - Sebastian Fitzek

64. “What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin line there all round everything.[...]It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric?” - James Joyce

65. “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

66. “Go on till you come to the end; then stop.” - Lewis Carroll

67. “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

68. “In the end, we wear out our worries.” - Stephen King

69. “You don't have to be surprised when the end comes - just read the Word of God and get the full scoop!” - Velyn Cooper

70. “Good thing or bad thing must surely come to an end but absoluety nothing last forever” - Maryann

71. “When things go well for days on end, it is an hilarious accident.” - Kurt Vonnegut

72. “Dans chaque fin, il y a un début.” - Libba Bray