Best Film Endings
(not including credits, songs or lines listed below)

Best Film End Credits

Best Uses of a Song for a Film Ending

Best Play Endings

Best Final Songs on an Album

Best Artistic Goodbyesimrs

  • 1881:  The Brothers Karamazov
    • Dostoevsky’s final novel, died months after publication
  • 1949:  1984
    • Orwell’s final novel, died months after publication
  • 1970:  Loaded
    • The Velvet Underground’s final album
  • 1977:  That Obscure Object of Desire
    • Luis Buñuel’s final film
  • 1983:  Synchronicity
    • the final album from The Police
  • 1983:  “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen”
    • the final episode of M*A*S*H
  • 1984:  A Passage to India
    • David Lean’s final film
  • 1990:  “The Last Newhart”
    • the final episode of “Newhart”
  • 1991:  X-Men #3
    • Chris Claremont’s farewell after 16 years writing the series
  • 1992:  Our Time in Eden
    • Natalie Merchant’s last studio album with 10,000 Maniacs
  • 1994:  “All Good Things…”
    • the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • 1995:  “It’s a magical world.”
    • the final Calvin and Hobbes strip
  • 1999:  Eyes Wide Shut
    • Stanley Kubrick’s final film

Best Last Lines in a Film

  • 1930:  Little Caesar
    • “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?”
  • 1937:  A Star is Born
    • “Hello, everybody. This is Mrs. Norman Maine.”
  • 1942:  Casablanca
    • “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
  • 1950:  Sunset Blvd.
    • “All right, Mr. De Mille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
  • 1955:  Mr. Roberts
    • “Captain, it is I, Ensign Pulver, and I just threw your stinking palm tree overboard.  Now, what’s all this crud about no movie tonight?”
  • 1957:  Witness for the Prosecution
    • “Sir Wilfred, you’ve forgotten your brandy.”
  • 1959:  Some Like It Hot
    • “I’m a man.”  “Well, nobody’s perfect.”
  • 1971:  A Clockwork Orange
    • “I was cured, all right.”
  • 1972:  The Candidate
    • “What do we do now?”
  • 1976:  The Front
    • “I don’t recognize the right of this committee to ask me these kind of questions.  And furthermore, you can go all fuck yourselves.”
  • 1977:  Annie Hall
    • “I thought of that old joke, you know, the this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken,’ and uh, the doctor says, ‘Well why don’t you turn him in?”  And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’  Well, I guess that pretty much now how I feel about relationships.  You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and – but uh, I guess we keep going through it because most of us need the eggs.”
  • 1984:  The Killing Fields
    • “Forgive me?”  “Nothing to forgive, Sydney.  Nothing.”
  • 1987:  The Princess Bride
    • “As you wish.”
  • 1991:  The Commitments
    • “So, lookin’ back, Jimmy, what do you feel you have learned most from your experience with The Commitments?  Well, that’s a tricky question, Terry.  But, as I always said, we skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels ‘cross the floor.  I was feelin’ kinda seasick but the crowd called out for more.  That’s very profound, Jimmy.  What does it mean?”  (pause)  “I’m fucked if I know, Terry!”
  • 1995:  Trainspotting
    • “Now I’ve justified this to myself in all sorts of ways. It wasn’t a big deal, just a minor betrayal. Or we’d outgrown each other, you know, that sort of thing. But let’s face it, I ripped them off, my so-called mates. But, Begbie, I couldn’t give a shit about him. And Sick Boy, well, he’d have done the same to me, if he’d only thought of it first. And Spud, well, OK, I felt sorry for Spud – he never hurt anybody…So why did I do it? I could offer a million answers, all false. The truth is that I’m a bad person. But, that’s gonna change – I’m going to change. This is the last of that sorta thing. Now I’m cleanin’ up and I’m movin’ on, goin’ straight and choosin’ life. I’m lookin’ forward to it already. I’m gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fuckin’ big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact disc, an electrical tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.”

Best Last Lines in a Novel

  • 1831:  The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (Victor Hugo, tr. Elizabeth McCracken)
    • “One of the skeletons, which was that of a woman, still had on it some rags of a dress that had once been white; and around the neck was a necklace of the seeds of adrezarach, and a little silk bag embroidered with green beads, which was open and empty.  These things were of so little value that the hangman no doubt had not thought it worth his while to take them.  The second, which embraced the first tightly, was the skeleton of a man.  It was noticed that the spine was crooked, the head jammed between the shoulder blades, and one leg shorter than the other.  There was, however, no rupture of the vertebræ of the neck, and it was obvious that the person to whom it belonged had not been hanged.  He must have come there and died in the place.  When those who found this skeleton attempted to disengage it from the one it embraced, it fell to dust.”
  • 1859:  A Tale of Two Cities  (Charles Dickens)
    • ” ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’ “
  • 1899:  Heart of Darkness  (Joseph Conrad)
    • “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
  • 1913:  Sons and Lovers  (D.H. Lawrence)
    • “He would not take that direction, to the darkness, to follow her.  He walked towards the faintly humming, glowing town, quickly.”
  • 1914:  The Dead  (James Joyce)
    • “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.”
  • 1919:  Winesburg, Ohio  (Sherwood Anderson)
    • “He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.”
  • 1922:  Ulysses  (James Joyce)
    • “and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
  • 1924:  A Passage to India  (E.M. Forster)
    • ” ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately.  ‘It’s what I want.  It’s what you want.’  But the horses didn’t want it – they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said, in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.'”
  • 1925:  The Great Gatsby  (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
    • “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
  • 1926:  The Sun Also Rises  (Ernest Hemingway)
    • “‘Oh, Jake,’ Brett said, ‘we could have had such a damned good time together.’  Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki directing traffic.  He raised his baton.  The car slowed suddenly pressing Brett against me.  ‘Yes,’ I said.  ‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?'”
  • 1928:  The House at Pooh Corner  (A.A. Milne)
    • “So they went off together.  But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
  • 1928:  All Quiet on the Western Front  (Erich Maria Remarque, tr. A.W. Wheen)
    • “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.  He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping.  Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
  • 1929:  The Sound and the Fury  (William Faulkner)
    • “The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and façade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.”
  • 1936:  Absalom, Absalom!  (William Faulkner)
    • “‘Now I want you to tell me just one thing more.  Why do you hate the South?’  ‘I dont hate it,’ Quentin said, quickly at once, immediately; ‘I dont hate it,’ he said, I dont hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I dont.  I dont!  I dont hate it!  I dont hate it!“
  • 1941:  What Makes Sammy Run  (Budd Schulberg)
    • “It was a terrifying and wonderful document, the record of where Sammy ran, and if you looked behind the picture and between the lines you might even discover what made him run.  And some day I would like to see it published, as a blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the twentieth century.”
  • 1942:  The Stranger  (Albert camus, tr. Stuart Gilbert)
    • “And I, too, felt ready to start life all over again.  It was if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.  To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.  For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”
  • 1946:  Build My Gallows High  (Geoffrey Homes [Daniel Mainwaring])
    • “He didn’t hear the gun when Guy shot him because he was dead.”
  • 1946:  Animal Farm  (George Orwell)
    • “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.”
  • 1948:  The Plague  (Albert Camus, tr. Stuart Gilbert)
    • “And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled.  He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
  • 1949:  1984  (George Orwell)
    • “But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.  He had won the victory over himself.  He loved Big Brother.”
  • 1951:  The Catcher in the Rye  (J.D. Salinger)
    • “Don’t ever tell anybody anything.  If you do you start missing everybody.”
  • 1951:  The End of the Affair  (Graham Greene)
    • “I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”
  • 1953:  The Adventures of Augie March  (Saul Bellow)
    • “I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor.  Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains.  Which didn’t prove there was no America.”
  • 1955:  The Quiet American  (Graham Greene)
    • “Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”
  • 1955:  Lolita  (Vladimir Nabokov)
    • “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the refuge of art.  And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”
  • 1956:  The Last Battle  (C.S. Lewis)
    • “And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.  And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after.  But for them it was only the beginning of the real story.  All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has ever read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
  • 1960:  Rabbit, Run  (John Updike)
    • “His hands life of their own and he feels the wind on his ears even before, his heels hitting heavily on the pavement at first but with an effortless gathering out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs.  Ah: runs.  Runs.”
  • 1966:  The Crying of Lot 49  (Thomas Pynchon)
    • “Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.”
  • 1967:  One Hundred Years of Solitude  (Gabriel García Márquez, tr. Gregory Rabassa)
    • “Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
  • 1968:  Nova  (Samuel R. Delany)
    • “The only way to protect myself from the jinx, I guess, would be to abandon it before I finish the last”
  • 1969:  Portnoy’s Complaint  (Philip Roth)
    • “Now vee may perhaps to begin.  Yes?”
  • 1971:  Rabbit, Redux  (John Updike)
    • “He slides down an inch on the cool sheet and fits his microcosmic self limp into the curved crevice between the polleny offered nestling orbs of her ass; he would stiffen but his hand having let her breasts go comes upon the familiar dip of her waist, ribs to hip bone, where no bones are, soft as flight, fat’s inward curve, slack, his babies from her belly.  He finds this inward curve and slips along it, sleeps.  He.  She.  Sleeps.  O.K.?”
  • 1972:  Watership Down  (Richard Adams)
    • “’You needn’t worry about them,’ said his companion. ‘They’ll be all right – and thousands like them.  If you’ll come along, I’ll show you what I mean.’  He reached the top of the bank in a single, powerful leap.  Hazel followed; and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom.”
  • 1973:  The Princess Bride  (William Goldman)
    • “I’m not trying to make this a downer, understand.  I mean, I really do think that love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.  But I also have to say, for the umpty-umpth time, that life isn’t fair.  It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”
  • 1974:  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  (Robert Pirsig)
    • “Trials never end, of course.  Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it.  It’s going to get better now.  You can sort of tell these things.”
  • 1977:  Song of Solomon  (Toni Morrison)
    • “Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees – he leaped.  As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled towards Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother.  For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
  • 1978:  The World According to Garp  (John Irving)
    • “In the world according to her father, Jenny Garp knew, we must have energy.  Her famous grandmother, Jenny Fields, once thought of us as Externals, Vital Organs, Absentees, and Goners.  But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.”
  • 1979:  Sophie’s Choice  (William Styron)
    • “This was not judgment day – only morning.  Morning: excellent and fair.”
  • 1979:  If on a winter’s night a traveler  (Italo Calvino, tr. William Weaver)
    • “Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader.  A great double bed receives your parallel readings.  Ludmilla closes her book, turns off her light, puts her head back against the pillow, and says ‘Turn off your light, too.  Aren’t you tired of reading?’  And you say, ‘just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.'”
  • 1981:  The Hotel New Hampshire  (John Irving)
    • “Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.  You have to keep passing the open windows.”
  • 1981:  Rabbit is Rich  (John Updike)
    • “Through all this she has pushed to be here, in his lap, his hands, a real presence hardly weighing anything but alive.  Fortune’s hostage, heart’s desire, a granddaughter.  His.  Another nail in his coffin.  His.”
  • 1988:  The Silence of the Lambs  (Thomas Harris)
    • “But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.”
  • 1990:  Hocus Pocus  (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
    • “Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the universe.”
  • 1990:  The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition  (Stephen King)
    • “Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long.  And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.”
  • 1990:  Rabbit at Rest  (John Updike)
    • “Rabbit thinks he should say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough.  Maybe.  Enough.”
  • 1991:  Patrimony  (Philip Roth)
    • “You must not forget anything.”
  • 1993:  The Shipping News  (Annie Proulx)
    • “Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string.  And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.”
  • 1995:  Sabbath’s Theater  (Philip Roth)
    • “And he couldn’t do it.  He could not fucking die.  How could he leave?  How could he go?  Everything he hated was here.”
  • 1995:  High Fidelity  (Nick Hornby)
    • “When Laura hears the opening bars she spins round and grins and makes several thumbs-up signs and I start to compile in my head a compilation tape for her, something that’s full of stuff she’s heard of, and full of stuff she’d play.  Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it’s done.”
  • 1995:  Wonder Boys  (Michael Chabon)
    • “The young men listen dutifully, for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for the parts that sound true.”
  • 1996:  Neverwhere  (Neil Gaiman)
    • “And they walked away together through the hole in the wall, back, into the darkness, leaving nothing behind them; not even the doorway.”
  • 1997:  Straight Man  (Richard Russo)
    • “Clearly the only solution would be for all of us to take a step backward so that the door could be pulled open.  By this point a group of plumbers, a group of bricklayers, a group of hookers, a group of chimpanzees would have figured this out.  But the room contained, unfortunately, a group of academics, and we couldn’t quite believe what had happened to us.”
  • 1998:  The Human Stain  (Philip Roth)
    • “Only rarely, at the end of our century, does life offer up a vision as pure and peaceful as this one: a solitary man on a bucket, fishing through eighteen inches of ice in a lake that’s constantly turning over its water atop an arcadian mountain in America.”
  • 2000:  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay  (Michael Chabon)
    • “When Rosa and Joe picked it up they saw that Sammy had taken a pen and, bearing down, crossed out the name of the never-more-than-theoretical family that was printed above the address, and in its place written, sealed in a neat black rectangle, knotted by the stout cord of an ampersand, the words KAVALIER & CLAY.”
  • 2004:  Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell  (Susanna Clarke)
    • “They kissed once.  Then he turned upon his heel and disappeared into the Darkness.”
  • 2009:  Inherent Vice  (Thomas Pynchon)
    • “Doc figured if he missed the Gordita Beach exit he’d take the first one whose sign he could read and work his way back on surface streets.  He knew that at Rosecrans the freeway began to dogleg east, and at some point, Hawthorne Boulevard or Artesia, he’d lose the fog, unless it was spreading tonight, and settled in regionwide.  Maybe then it would stay this way for days, maybe he’s just have to keep driving, down past Long Beach, down through Orange County, and San Diego, and across a border where nobody could tell anymore in the fog who was Mexican, who was Anglo, who was anybody.  Then again, he might run out of gas before that happened, and have to leave the caravan, and pull over on the shoulder, and wait.  For whatever would happen.  For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket.  For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him.  For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride.  For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead.”
Advertisement