So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (Gatsby)

Also, not the last line of the whole play but Hamlet's last spoken line "The rest is silence"

Do movies count? "Nobody's perfect," from "Some Like it Hot".

trying to keep it books, although sufficiently iconic movies would work. It just has to be instantly recognizable.

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

And however superciliously the highbrows carp, we the public in our heart of hearts all like a success story; so perhaps my ending is not so unsatisfactory after all.

Well, it's from a film, but it's always been one of my favourite last lines:

"Sex and death - two things that come once in a lifetime... but at least after death, you're not nauseous."

"You met me at a very strange time in my life." -Fight Club (movie)

"I was cured all right." -A Clockwork Orange (movie, & the American edition of the book, I think.)

I'm pretty sure that the last line of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is "And then they were upon her."

One of the best second-to-last paragraphs:

“Listen!” it said. “We’ll tell you the last, the most beautiful and secret story — shut your eyes — it is a very small story — a story that gets smaller and smaller — it comes inward instead of opening like a flower — it is a flower becoming a seed — a little cold seed — do you hear? we are leaning closer to you” —

Possibly not famous, but the last line of this story just gives me the chills over and over and over. Read it; it's a great great story.

[Spoiler]










Then ...... some idiot turned on the lights.

Ray Bradbury.

"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."
James Joyce - The Dead

"He loved Big Brother."

"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."

"Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

"I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!"

"For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate."

"Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."

"Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-west; the paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left. South-south-west, south, south-east, east..."

"Well I'm back."

He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
--
Oedipa settled back, to await the crying of lot 49.
--
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.
--
Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?
--
Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."


"When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack."


"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky - seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

A short story by Arthur C. "2001" Clarke has the last line to end all last lines, semi-literally:

"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."

"And they lived happily ever after."

(Several people were incredulous that this had not occurred to me)