Here are a few of your favorite sad and tortured storytellers taking advantage of their final crack at dialog to say one last important thing. Do these, their last words, sum up the gestalt of their work and thought? See how history's rouged recusants really sounded, without time for edits. Will you be as light on your feet as Oscar Wilde when facing the Reaper? Or will you go out like R.L. Stevenson, clutching your pate and screaming for it all to end?



Yukio Mishima: "Human life is limited; but I would like to live forever."

Jane Austen: "Nothing but death."

J.M. Barrie: "I can't sleep."

James Thurber: "God bless. God damn."

Oscar Wilde: "Either this wallpaper goes or I do."

O. Henry: [singing] "Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark."

Victor Hugo: "I see black light."

Anton Chekhov: "It's been a long time since I've had champagne."

James Joyce: "Does nobody understand?"

Henry Jones: [Which do you want to stay with you tonight? Your niece, or your nurse?] "The prettier. Now fight for it."

Edgar Allan Poe: "Lord help my poor soul."

George Bernard Shaw: "Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die."

George Kelly: "My dear, before you kiss me good-bye, fix your hair. It's a mess."

Franz Kafka: "Kill me, or else you are a murderer!"

Leo Tolstoy: "Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six."

Kurt Vonnegut: "And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say: 'Kurt is up in heaven now'. That's my favorite joke."

H.G. Wells: "Go away. I'm alright."

Eugene O'Neill: "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room -- and goddammit -- died in a hotel room."

Robert Louis Stevenson: "My head! My head!"

Boris Pasternak: "Goodbye...why am I hemorrhaging?"

William Saroyan: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?"

William Burroughs: "Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is...LOVE."

Posted by miracle on Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:21:33 -0400 -- permanent link