MILAN – In the past we have talked to you about the best opening words of literature . Today is the turn of the endings: finishing a good book is always a little pain, but the endings of certain stories are softened by the beauty of the closing sentences. Sure, the ending of a story is always goodbye, but sometimes it can be a nice goodbye. Here are the most beautiful final steps in literature.
“So we continue to row, boats against the current, pushed back into the past without rest.”
Francis Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“All of Enid’s corrections had been useless. He was as stubborn as the day she met him. And yet when she died, after kissing his forehead and going out with Denise and Gary in the warm spring night, Enid felt that nothing could kill her hope anymore, nothing. She was seventy-five and she intended to change some things in her life. ”
Jonathan Franzen, Corrections
“I raised my head. The horizon was barred out to sea by a black bank of clouds, and that tranquil current, which led to the most remote confines of the earth, ran darkly away under a frowning sky; and it seemed to lead within the heart of an immense darkness. ”
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“I wanted to scream, I wanted to scream, I wanted to tear my lungs apart, like Papillon, with all the strength of my stomach, breaking my windpipe, with all the voice that my throat could still pump: ‘Damn bastards, I’m still alive!’.”
Roberto Saviano, Gomorra
“After a long debate and search together, they concluded that trouble often comes, because we have given cause; but that the most cautious and most innocent conduct is not enough to keep them away; and that when they come, either through fault or without fault, trust in God softens them, and makes them useful for a better life. This conclusion, although found by poor people, seemed so right to us that we thought of putting it here, as the sauce of all history.
Which, if you are not sorry at all, love those who wrote it, and even a little bit to those who recommended it. But if instead we managed to get bored, believe that it was not done on purpose. ”
Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed
“Here is the device that creates the imbalance, the disease, with the annulment of the laws of Nature. Perhaps through a catastrophe produced by bombs we will return to health. When the poisonous gases are no longer enough, one man will invent an incomparable explosive and another sicker man will steal this explosive and climb to the center of the Earth, where its effect can be the greatest. There will be a huge explosion that no one will hear and the Earth, having returned to its nebulous form, will roam the skies, free of parasites and disease. ”
Italo Svevo, Zeno’s conscience
“Whatever our conflicts and our triumphs have been, however indelible the mark they may have left on us, they always end up dissolving like a watercolor paint on a sheet of paper.”
Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
“She was immediately carried away by the waves and was lost, in the darkness and in the distance.”
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