The Last Paragraph of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow”

The Last Paragraph of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow

And the rainbow stood on earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they could cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven. 

The Last Paragraph of Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado

The Last Paragraph of Testo Junkie by Paul Preciado

As we walk away from your body, which has already begun to ferment among the flowers of Montparnasse, I promise you that we will come to rub our bodies against your grave, that we will come to leave traces of our bodily fluids on the slab; like a pack of mutating wolves, we will sleep on your earth, warm your bones; and like vampires, we will come to quench your thirst for sex, blood, and testosterone. 

(translated from the French by Bruce Benderson)

The last page of Triste Tropiques by Claude Lévi Strauss

The last page of Triste Tropiques by Claude Lévi Strauss

 

Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society alone among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us provided we are alive and the world is in existence a precarious arch that points towards the inaccessible. 

 

The road which it indicates to us is one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may be open in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. 

 

This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, this chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends. Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying!

 

And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labors, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man; in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the blink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat. 

 

(Contributed by Elizabeth Ames) 

The Last Paragraph of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

The Last Paragraph of Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling


She would hang a sign in the restaurant window---Owt to luntsch. Bee bak in a whale. For she could not spell either.

The Last Line of Dodie Bellamy's Pink Steam

The Last Line of Dodie Bellamy's Pink Steam



Boy was I in for a big surprise....

The Last Lines of Janet Flanner's The Cubical City

The Last Lines of Janet Flanner's The Cubical City


Slowly Delia closed her eyes, her head sightless, erect, and yellow, holding its distance from the shadows that spread around her in her chair.

The Last Paragraph of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head

The Last Paragraph of Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head


I gave her back the bright light of the smile, now softening at last out of irony. "So must you, my dear!"

The Last Paragraph of David Shield's How Literature Saved My Life

The Last Paragraph of David Shield's How Literature Saved My Life

I wanted Literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this---which is what makes it essential.

The Last Lines of Romeo and Juliet

The Last Lines of Romeo and Juliet


For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych


He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

The Last Paragraph of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!

The Last Paragraph of Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter

The Last Paragraph of Philip Larkin's A Girl in Winter



Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end glad that such order, such destiny, existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will, and all that made for protest, could at last sleep.

The Last Paragraph of Go Ask Alice

The Last Paragraph of Go Ask Alice


See ya.

The Last Paragraph of Pansy Sonata by Kenneth Weyerhaeuser

The Last Paragraph of Kenneth Weyerhaeuser's Pansy Sonata



"It's a surge---a surge of feelings."
"Surge all you want, old girl," Hugo grinned. "You've got my permission."

The Last Paragraph of Shelia Heti's How Should A Person Be?

The Last Paragraph of Shelia Heti's How Should A Person Be?



 
   And so they were.

The Last Stanza of the First Canto of Lord Bryon's Don Juan

The Last Stanza of the First Canto of Lord Bryon's Don Juan



                                                                   222

'Go, little book, from this my solitude!
    I cast thee on the waters, go thy ways!
And if, as I believe, thy vein be good,
   The world will find thee after many days.'
When Southey's read, and Wordsworth understood,
    I can't help putting in my claim to praise---
The four first rhymes are Southey's every line:
 For God's sake, reader! take them not for mine.

The Last Paragraph Of The First Part of Don Quixote

The Last Paragraph Of The First Part of Don Quixote



"That may well be," responded the canon, "but by the orders I received, I do not remember seeing it. And even if I concede that it is there, I am not therefore obliged to believe the histories of so many Amadises, or those of that throng of knights about whom they tell us stories, nor is it reasonable for an honorable man like your grace, possessed of your qualities and fine understanding, to accept as true the countless absurd exaggerations that are written in those nonsensical books of chivalry."

The Last Paragraph of Jack Kerouac's On the Road

The Last Paragraph of Jack Kerouac's On the Road



So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The Last Paragraph of Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers

The Last Paragraph of Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers



Leave, with no answer. Move on to the next question.

The Last Paragraph of Bhagavad-Gita As It Is

The Last Paragraph of Bhagavad-Gita As It Is



The living entity in his original position is pure spirit. He is just like an atomic particle of the Supreme Spirit. Thus Lord Krsna may be compared to the sun, and the living entities to sunshine. Because the living entities are the marginal energy of Krsna, they have a tendency to be in contact wither with the material energy or with the spiritual energy. In other words, the living entity is situated between the two energies of the Lord, and because he belongs to the superior energy of the Lord, he has a particle of independence. By proper use of that independence he comes under the direct order of Krsna. Thus he attains his normal condition in the pleasure-giving potency.

The last paragraphs of Bret Easton Ellis' Glamorama

The Last Paragraphs of Brett Easton Ellis' Glamorama



I'm drinking a glass of water in the empty hotel bar at the Principe di Savoia and staring at the mural behind the bar and in the mural there is a giant mountain, a vast field spread out below it where villagers are celebrating in a field of long grass that blankets the mountain dotted with tall white flowers, and in the sky above the mountain it's morning and the sun is spreading itself across the mural's frame, burning over the small cliffs and the low-hanging clouds that encircle the mountain's peak, and a bridge strung across a pass through the mountain will take you to any point beyond that you need to arrive at, because behind that mountain is a highway and along that highway are billboards with answers on them -- who, what, where, when, why -- and I'm falling forward but also moving up toward the mountain, my shadow looming against its jagged peaks, rising up, a fiery wind propelling me, and soon it's night and stars hang in the sky above the mountain, revolving as they burn.

The stars are real.

The future is that mountain.

The Last Paragraph of John Gardner's Grendel

The Last Paragraph of John Gardner's Grendel



Again sight clears. I am slick with blood. I discover I no longer feel pain. Animals gather around me, enemies of old, to watch me die. I give them what I hope will appear a sheepish smile. My heart booms terror. Will the last of my life slide out if I let out breath? They watch with mindless, indifferent eyes, as calm and midnight black as the chasm below me. Is it joy I feel? They watch on, evil, incredibly stupid, enjoying my destruction. "Poor Grendel's had an accident," I whisper. "So may you all."

The Last Paragraph of William Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury

The Last Paragraph of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury



Ben's voice roared and roared. Queenie moved again, her feet began to clop-clop steadily again, and at once Ben hushed. Luster looked quickly back over his shoulder, then he drove on. The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post to tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.

The Last Paragraph of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species

The Last Paragraph of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species




Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The Last Paragraph of Rob Sheffield's Love Is a Mix Tape

The Last Paragraph of Rob Sheffield's Love Is a Mix Tape



What is love? Great minds have been grappling with this question through the ages, and in the modern era, they have come up with many different answers. According to the Western philosopher Pat Benetar, love is a battlefield. Her paisan Frank Sinatra would add the corollary that love is a tender trap. The stoner kids who spent the summer of 1978 looking cool on the hoods of their Trans Ams in the Pierce Elementary School parking lot used to scare us little kids by blasting the Sweet hit "Love is Like Oxygen"—you get too much, you get too high, not enough and you're gonna die. Love hurts. Love stinks. Love bites, love bleeds, love is the drug. The troubadours of our times all agree: They want to know what love is, and they want you to show them.


But the answer is simple. Love is a mix tape.

The Last Paragraph of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

The Last Paragraph of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking



I think about swimming with him into the cave at Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed, the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at the base of the point. The tide had to be just right. We had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right. We could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two years we lived there but it is what I remember. Each time we did it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it wrong. John never was. You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change. He told me that. No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.

The Last Paragraph of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road

The Last Paragraph of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road



"It's just that they were a rather strange couple. Irresponsible. The guarded way they'd look at you; the way they'd talk to you; unwholesome, sort of. Oh, and another thing. Do you know what I came across in the cellar? All dead and dried out? I came across an enormous box of sedum plantings that I must have spent an entire day collecting for them last spring. I remember very carefully selecting the best shoots and very tenderly packing them in just the right kind of soil -- that's the kind of thing I mean, you see. Wouldn't you think that when someone goes to a certain amount of trouble to give you a perfectly good plant, a living, growing thing, wouldn't you think the very least you'd do would be to--"

But from there on Howard Givings heard only a welcome, thunderous sea of silence. He had turned off his hearing aid.

The Last Paragraph of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son

The Last Paragraph of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son



All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.

The Last Paragraph of Denis Johnson's Angels

The Last Paragraph of Denis Johnson's Angels

It was Frederick's understanding that that prisoners had a story: that each night for months, at nine precisely, a light had burned in a window on the town, where the men on one cell block's upper tier could see it and wonder, and imagine, each one, that it shone for him alone. But that was just a story, something that people tell themselves, something to pass the time it takes for the violence inside a man to wear him away, or to be consumed itself, depending on who is the candle and who is the light.

The Last Paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

The Last Paragraph of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian


And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he'll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling all at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.

The Last Paragraph of Philip Roth Sabbath's Theatre

The Last Paragraph of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theatre



And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

The Last Paragraph of Don DeLillo's Underworld

The Last Paragraph of Don DeLillo's Underworld



And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggy-back races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in a drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive—a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.

Peace.

The Last Paragraph of James Joyce's The Dead

The last paragraph of James Joyce's "The Dead"



A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.