The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #290 -- Famous Last Words (Short Stories)

What are you favorite closing lines and endings from short stories?

“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
-- Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find"

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
-- Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"

"I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark."
--Ramond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

"Beyond this was only darkness... unknowing and unknown."
-- Ryunosuke Akutagawa, "Rashomon

"There was a sound of thunder."
-- Ray Bradbury, "A Sound of Thunder"

"He was sobbing violently now. 'We've crucified the Son of God, and we're going to do it next tour, and the next and the next...'
"'For ever and ever, time without end, amen,' finished Harry, humbly."
-- Gary Killworth, 'Let's Go to Golgotha"

Then suddenly I comprehended, and sprang through the hall-way to the marble-room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face, and through it, in a heavenly glory, the " Madonna " smiled, as Genevifeve lifted her flushed face from her marble couch and opened her sleepy eyes.
-- Robert Chambers, "The Mask"

"Outside the tent the hyena made the same strange noise that had awakened her. But she did not hear him for the beating of her heart."

-- Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjero"

"The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!"

-- H.P. Lovecraft, "Dagon"

"You needn’t ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn’t call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”

-- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror

"Only then did she understand that three thousand years had passed since the day she had had a desire to eat the first orange."

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Eva Is Inside Her Cat"

"She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea."

-- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"

"I was glad when she left-even though she didn't bother to tell me goodbye."

-- Raymond Chandler, "Trouble Is My Business