Time for the Morphine: Authors’ Famous Last Words

by |August 21, 2013

Only a truly great writer can have their last words hang in the air for all eternity.

From the philosophical to the downright silly, here are some of the greatest last words ever uttered.


Dylan Thomas

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“I’ve had 18 straight whiskeys. I think that’s the record”


Damon Runyon

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“You can keep the thing of bronze and stone and give me just one man to remember me once a year”


Alexandre Dumas

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“I shall never know how it all comes out now”
(Referring to his unfinished Count of Monte Cristo)


Francois Rabelais

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“I am going to seek the Great Perhaps”


Frank O’Connor Frank O'Connor

“I hope you don’t expect me to entertain you”


Giacomo Casanova

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“I have lived as a philosopher but I’ll die as a Christian”


Johann Goethe

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“Open the second shutter so more light can come in”


Heinrich Heine

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“God will forgive me. That’s his trade”


Henry James

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“So it has come at last, this distinguished thing”


James Thurber

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“God bless. God damn”


James Joyce

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“Is there one who understands me?”


D.H. Lawrence

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“Time for the morphine”


Lytton Strachey

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“If this is dying, I don’t think much of it”


H.L. Menchen

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“Tell my friends I’m a hell of a mess”


Noel Coward

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“Goodnight my darlings”


Oscar Wilde

“Either that wallpaper goes or I do”


George Bernard Shaw

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“Sister , you are trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I’m done.
I’m finished” (To his nurse)


Leo Tolstoy

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“Even in the valley of the shadow of death, two and two do not make six”
(Refusing to return to the Orthodox Church that excommunicated him)


William Saroyan

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“Everybody’s got to die, but I always thought an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”


Victor Hugo

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“I see a black light”


W. Somerset Maugham

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“Dying is a dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it”


Alexander Pope

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“Here I am, dying of a hundred good symptoms”
(After a doctor said he was looking well)


Anton Chekhov

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“It’s a long time since I’ve drunk champagne”


Henrik Ibsen

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“On the contrary”
(After his wife suggested he was looking better)

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About the Contributor

Andrew Cattanach is a regular contributor to The Booktopia Blog. He has been shortlisted for The Age Short Story Prize and was named a finalist for the 2015 Young Bookseller of the Year Award. He enjoys reading, writing and sleeping, though finds it difficult to do them all at once.

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