Nine knockout last lines in literature

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Chrissie Gruebel tagged nine of the best last lines in literature, including:

“So this is what everybody’s always talking about. Diablo! If only I’d known. The beauty! The beauty!”
—Oscar Wao, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Why it tears us up: The line is delivered posthumously (in a letter), and it just seems all the more sad that way. Wao’s all-too-brief life is unfair, and that fact is annoying.

Read about another line on the list.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao also appears among Alexia Nader's nine favorite books about unhappy families, Jami Attenberg's top six books with overweight protagonists, Brooke Hauser's six top books about immigrants, Sara Gruen's six favorite books, Paste magazine's list of the ten best debut novels of the decade (2000-2009), and The Millions' best books of fiction of the millenium. The novel is one of Matthew Kaminski's five favorite novels about immigrants in America and is a book that made a difference to Zoë Saldana.

The Page 99 Test: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

--Marshal Zeringue