You would think that people who dedicate their entire lives to words and the power they have when crafting stories, also think carefully on their last words. And for some authors, you are right. For others, not so much…
Check out the last words of several famous authors below!
Ernest Hemingway: “Goodnight my kitten!”
(spoken to his wife right before he killed himself)
Jane Austen: “I want nothing but death.”
(in response to her sister Cassandra who asked if she wanted anything)
J. M. Barrie: “I can’t sleep.”
L. Frank Baum: “Now I can cross the shifting sands.”
Edgar Allan Poe: “Lord help my poor soul!”
Mark Twain: “Goodbye. If we meet –“
(spoken to his daughter Clara)
Louisa May Alcott: “Is it not meningitis?”
(she died from mercury poisoning, not meningitis – as she believed)
Washington Irving: “I have to set my pillows one more night, when will this end already?”
Leo Tolstoy: “But the peasants… how do the peasants die?”
Hans Christian Andersen: “Don’t ask me how I am! I understand nothing more.”
Charles Dickens: “On the ground!”
(he suffered a stroke and was asking to be laid on the ground)
H. G. Wells: “Go away! I’m all right.”
(he didn’t know he was dying)
Voltaire: “Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.”
(when asked by a priest to renounce satan
Dylan Thomas: “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies… I think that’s the record.”
James Joyce: “Does nobody understand?”
Oscar Wilde: “Either the wallpaper goes, or I do.”
Roald Dahl: “Ow, fuck.”
(it is widely believed that his last words were “You know, I’m not frightened. It’s just that I will miss you all so much! – but his actual last words were spoken right after the nurse injected him with morphine to ease his passing)
Emily Dickinson: “I must go in, the fog is rising.”
Happy reading,
Loes M.