"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." The last lines of The Catcher in The Rye by JD Salinger, who died today. It is an important, if slightly overrated, novel hijacked by disaffected and self-professed 'misunderstood' teens, and the odd serial killer. The line is up there with some great last lines in literature. A few spring to mind. John Fowles The Magus "A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves." Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: "This is not an exit." Of course, the great closing line of the great American novel- The Great Gatsby- "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
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