via Entertainment Weekly:
20 classic last words in books
Parting thoughts that stick with us from Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, and more
”The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
—George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
I’ll add a twenty-first entry, the conclusion of Moby Dick (a bit of a cheat since a one paragraph epilogue follows, but what the heck):
“and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”
Akopos 