in closing: famous last words.

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.

In Cold Blood

Truman Capote, 1965

Then she would say to herself, ‘If they want to shoot me, I have the same kind of guts Gary has. Let them come.’

The Executioner’s Song

Norman Mailer, 1979

Now everybody—

Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon, 1973

‘You can trust me,’ R.V. says, watching her hand. ‘I’m a man of my

The Broom of the System

David Foster Wallace, 1987

Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to

Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany, 1974

‘Shall we stagger?’

They staggered.

Mike

P.G. Wodehouse, 1909

By noon, the island had gone down in the horizon; and all before us was the wide Pacific.

Omoo

Herman Melville, 1847

And the spaceship shot swiftly through the endless, trackless eternity of the void.…

“Mr. Spaceship”

Philip K. Dick, 1953

He crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved.

Kim

Rudyard Kipling, 1901

The cults of the famous and the dead.

White Noise

Don DeLillo, 1985