Top 51 Last Sentence Quotes
#1. When I start, I have a feeling for the characters, and maybe the shape of the story. Sometimes I might even have the last sentence in mind. But, no book I've ever written has ever ended the way I thought it would. Characters disappear, others come forward. Once you start writing, everything changes.
Paul Auster
#2. If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
John Irving
#3. John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'
Tom Robbins
#4. Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.
Elias Canetti
#5. I tend to like the last sentence I just wrote, which is: 'It was late in the fall and the trees lining our driveway had turned red like a row of burning matches.'
Jess Walter
#6. I don't begin a novel until I have written, not just the last sentence, but usually, as a result thereof, many of the surrounding final paragraphs, so that in addition to knowing what happens, I know what the voice is.
John Irving
#7. Nancy's last sentence is on the last page in your file. There is nothing more we know. As the sheriff might say, we don't have anything farther.
Karin Slaughter
#8. Her words, her jumbled, mad thoughts tamed or simply broken, made language, and she took another drag off the Lucky, exhaled, and read the last sentence aloud.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#9. She didn't even finish her last sentence; it just trailed off. I think the subject had changed in her head while her mouth had continued on the old topic, not realizing it was out of supplies.
Steve Martin
#10. And where did he finish the last sentence he would ever begin on earth?
Stephen King
#11. There are always surprises. You should probably grab a highlighter right now and highlight the crap out of that last sentence.
Michael Makai
#12. He was doing quite well until the last sentence, but if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.
David Mitchell
#13. You should've come with me. Had fun, lots of fun." The last sentence was deep with sensuality. "You don't know what you're missin', Faithie."
"Then I don't miss it, do I?" Faith whispered, and Jodie giggled.
Linda Howard
#15. I find it helpful when I stop for the day to leave the last sentence unfinished or the last paragraph only lightly sketched out, so that when I start again I can pick up where I left off the day before.
Julia Bell
#16. And in the last sentence I would like also to mention that Poland is one of the countries with which the United States has run strategic dialogues since last year.
Marek Belka
#17. Censorship is saying: 'I'm the one who says the last sentence. Whatever you say, the conclusion is mine.' But the internet is like a tree that is growing. The people will always have the last word - even if someone has a very weak, quiet voice. Such power will collapse because of a whisper.
Ai Weiwei
#18. She could give herself up to the written word as naturally as a good dancer to music or a fine swimmer to water. The only difficulty was that after finishing the last sentence she was left with a feeling at once hollow and uncomfortably full. Exactly like indigestion.
Jean Rhys
#19. What will the greatest experiment discover? I have no idea!, maybe nothing!, If we won't check, we will never know. In science there is never a guarantee of success. If you understood this last sentence, then you understood the most important message of this lecture.
Nathan Seiberg
#20. The next-to-last sentence that the Buddha is reported to have spoken as he was dying, before his final sentence of encouragement to his community, was Transient are all conditioned things.
Sylvia Boorstein
#21. I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.
Neil Gaiman
#22. She's on the last few chapters of some book she's been reading. She can't stay away from it. We're used to it by now. We always find her reading at the oddest times. Don't we, babe? He says the last sentence a little louder to get her attention.
Jay McLean
#23. The last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up.
Joan Didion
#24. How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence.
Pascal Mercier
#25. Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days.
P.D. James
#26. The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.
William Hazlitt
#27. This was it. Together. Forever. As we left it all behind, the sun warmed my back, lighting the way before us. I knew of no better omen.
Becca Fitzpatrick
#28. The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.
Jacques Lacan
#29. Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.
Joseph Campbell
#30. The last thing I have to say is that ice is the past tense of water. I've always wanted to write that sentence and now I have.
Rita Mae Brown
#31. On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide - it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese - the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#32. It's funny,' I noted in the diary, 'how often I seem to build a story around one sentence, nearly always the last one, too. The themes are a bit depressing but I just can't get rid of that.
Daphne Du Maurier
#33. Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.
John Casey
#34. Even the formal measure of the Seasons seemed suspended in the wintry silence.
Anthony Powell
#35. And, in the warm silence, in the peaceful solitude of the study, Clotilde smiled down at the baby who was still sucking - his little arm in the air, pointing upwards, a symbol of hope and life.
Emile Zola
#36. That is what I define as a novel: something that has a beginning, a middle and an end, with characters and a plot that sustain interest from the first sentence to the last. But that is not what I do at all.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
#37. Phoebe was thinking, Insubordinate. What a lovely word. And when was the last time she'd heard a nice-looking young man use it? Why-never, that's when. What a treat. And to have a ruler who could say conscientious and citizenry in the same sentence. Lovely.
Jean Ferris
#38. By the time the last of these relationships ended I was such a quaking mass of colliding, exploding neurotransmitter malfunctions that the only coherent sentence I could form in my native tongue went: Never again.
Merrill Markoe
#39. Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.
Roald Dahl
#40. The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.
William Golding
#41. So you and Bridget spent the better part of last night and early morning texting each other questionable messages?" Mom asked.
"I think it's called 'sexting,'" said Dad. It was the worst sentence uttered in the history of my life.
Sarah Skilton
#42. Then starting home, he walked toward the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.
Truman Capote
#43. And this is where I'll end, before I know what happens next.
Shannon Hale
#44. I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.
Paul Auster
#45. She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.
Helen Oyeyemi
#46. But at least it made one realize that life still held infinite possibilities for change.
Barbara Pym
#47. Whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Mark Twain
#48. The most emphatic place in a clause or sentence is the end. This is the climax; and, during the momentary pause that follows, that last word continues, as it were, to reverberate in the reader's mind. It has, in fact, the last word.
F.L. Lucas
#49. At last, the luminous match was struck and the day was lit.
Dorit Rabinyan
#50. Maybe civilization will collapse, we'll all succumb to disease and famine, and the last of us will be eaten by cats. Maybe we'll all be killed by nanobots hours after you read this sentence. There's no way to know.
Randall Munroe
#51. It was shaping up as a beautiful morning. The last thing I wanted to hear about was murder.
Jonathan Kellerman
