Last Line Quiz

[Spoiler warning: last lines of several novels are revealed in this posting.]

Several weeks ago I posted a First Line Quiz. I thought it might be interesting to see how easy it would be to now match the last lines from those same 20 selections with the authors and titles.

I'm not sure whether anyone actually collects last lines. I don't. They may contain spoilers, for one reason. But there are many novels and stories that end with a satisfying closing sentence or two. I'm sure we've all read a great story and come to the final few words, read them, sighed in appreciation, and closed the book with a sense of satisfaction, even regret at the journey's end.

In this case, several of these lines similarly impressed me; all were fun to rediscover. And one or two of them have an interesting story behind them.

So here are the twenty last lines in decreasing word count:

1. I enjoy the movement of life—kids falling in love, performing birds (there was an article on Aderyn the Blind Bird Queen in a popular periodical just after she died), new gelato flavors, ceremonies, anthills, poetry, loins, lions, the music of the eight tuned Chinese pipes suspended from an economically carved and highly stylized owl head at our window facing the lake maddened into the sweetest cacophony by a tramontana that will not abate in its passion, the woman below calling her son in (his name is Orlando and she says his father will be furioso), the ombrellone on our roof terrace blown out of its metal plinth, the spitted faraone for dinner tonight with a bottle of Menicocci, anything in fact that’s unincestuous.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. He thrilled as each cage door opened and the wild sables made their leap and broke for the snow—black on white, black on white, black on white, and then gone.
   
   
6. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger…a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
   
   
7. A present for my friends, he thought, and looked forward inside his mind, where no one could see, to Thanksgiving.
   
   
8. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.
   
   
9. If cuckolds catch a second wind, I am eagerly waiting for mine.
   
   
10. The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off.
    
    
11. “Thank goodness!” said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
    
    
12. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.
    
    
13. One bird said to Billy Pilgrim, “Poo-tee-weet?”
    
    
14. I been away a long time.
    
    
15. The Ramans do everything in threes.
    
    
16. He never saw Molly again.
    
    
17. I was cured all right.
    
    
18. “So may you all.”
    
    
19. “Terminal.”
    
    
20. Yes?

Now, here are the sources of the twenty lines, as previously published in the answers to the first quiz:

      --John Barth, The End of the Road
      --Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
      --Anthony Burgess, M/F
      --Albert Camus, The Stranger
      --Angela Carter, The Tiger Bride

      --Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous With Rama
      --Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly
      --John Gardner, Grendel
      --William Gibson, Neuromancer
      --William Goldman, The Princess Bride

      --Joseph Heller, Catch 22
      --John Irving, The 158-Pound Marriage
      --Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
      --Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
      --Herman Melville, Moby Dick

      --Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
      --Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park
      --Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
      --J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
      --Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five

Good luck matching the lines with their sources. Through careful reading and a process of elimination it shouldn't be difficult to get a half dozen correct; readers who share my taste in fiction should score over half right. Any score above 12 is excellent in my opinion.