Any nominations for those passages in novels which bring you to tears every time you read them?

GardenerGran

A thousand splendid suns. No spoilers, but if you’ve read it you’ll know. I absolutely sobbed.

I really struggled with the book: found it a hard read but, boy, was it worth it! I’m welling up just thinking about it! I didn’t find his next book as good.

The end of Watership Down, where the Black Rabbit comes for Hazel. I'm always in floods.

I’m another fan of Lee and Heston. I wept when the armoured bear died

"Sense and Sensability" - when Elinor finds out that the love of her life, Edward, is not married, as she believed, but single, and as much in love with her as she with him.......I cry very happy tears!!
"A Town Like Alice" - when Jean returns to the Malay village that took her in during WW2 and finds out that the Aussie soldier, who befriended her, is not dead, as she feared....... more happy tears

I love Dickens and he can always be relied on for a bit of melodrama. When little Jo the crossing boy dies in Bleak House.

When David Copperfield finally gets to the house of his aunt, bedraggled, robbed and exhausted and the maid tries to shoo him away as she doesn't recognise him.

When Helen dies in the dreadful school in Jane Eyre. Didn't finish that book for years and years because I couldn't get past that point.

The final sentence of The Mayor of Casterbridge (by Thomas Hardy) ends with Elizabeth Jane and says "She whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain".
This gets me every time...

‘The Remorseful Day’, the final Morse book.

When Lewis is at the mortuary.

‘But at least for the moment his only company was the dead. And bending down he put his lips to Morse’s forehead and whispered just two final words: ‘Goodbye, sir’.

Find the tv episode so moving when Kevin Whately does this scene with John Thaw. Must have been hard for both of them.

Oh yes, Black Beauty, Watership Down, Marley and Me - any book where the animal dies.

Lots of those mentioned above especially The Railway Children. Plus lots of parts of Tess Of The Durbervilles.

That scene with Morse and Lewis brought a tear to my eye as well Calendargirl
I read a book many years ago called Bonnie, it was about a little street girl in Victorian times who froze to death on the streets. Must be 60 years since I read the book but it's still in my mind.

Morse and Lewis for me too

Yes Morse and Lewis and Watership Down. I always well up when I hear the song Bright Eyes. Jane Eyre is sad I might read it again.

When I was a small child, I’d ask mum to read me the story of the little match girl, or the red shoes. Evidently my plea would include the promise “I won’t cry this time mummy”

The death of Minnehaha in The Song of Hiawatha brings me to tears every time I read it.

I sang the choral piece with a choir I was a member of, some years ago. It was very difficult to sing without weeping.

Black Beauty as a child. A Thousand Splendid Suns as an adult.....

I well up when Jane Eyre goes back to the broken Mr Rochester in the end. He's blind and is aware who she is. Very moving ( an old romantic I am afraid. )

Also the part in Captain Corelli's Mandoline when they find the snail shells in the jar years later.

Not to mention the father on the station in the Railway children.

“What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

This

And this
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

Sydney Carton’s sacrifice and final thoughts in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’:
“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.”
Mawkish, I know, but tears trickled down my cheeks in front of 32 teenagers when the whole of Dickens’ text was on the syllabus.

Jodi Taylor's And The Rest is History, in the Chronicles of St Mary's series, where Max's baby is stolen. The way she runs around trying desperately to find him, with her thoughts going wild, always brings back the 15 minutes over 25 years ago when I lost my daughter in a shopping centre. (There are many other passages in the series that make me cry with laughter)

The poem at the beginning of, 'Ring of Bright Water' by naturalist, Gavin Maxwell

I first read it shortly after I was married and full of romantic notions.

It's by Kathleen Raine from her The Marriage of Psyche and quite sad really as Kathleen was, for many years, in love with Gavin Maxwell, who was gay.
*********

He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river.
He has married me with the sun's circle
Too dazzling to see, traced in a summer sky.
He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud
That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,
Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,
Bound me to the whirlwind's centre.

He has married me with the orbit of the moon
And with the boundless circle of stars,
With the orbits that measure years, months, days, and nights,
Set the tides flowing,
Command the winds to travel or be at rest.

At the ring's centre,
Spirit or angel troubling the pool,
Causality not in nature,
Finger's touch that summons at a point,
a moment, Stars and planets, life and light
Or gathers clouds about an apex of gold,
Transcendent touch of love summons my world into being.

It's a bit flowery but it still brings a tear to my eye.

Wuthering Heights when Cathy dies and Heathcliffe begs her not to leave him, haunt me he says but do not leave me.

2 Operas that I saw :
Madam Butterfly and La Boheme. Saw both at the Liverpool Empire and I looked like Alice Cooper when I left.

Many books have the same effect,
How Green was my Valley. Roots. Tiny Tim in Dickens Christmas Carol.
Warhorse. Twopence to Cross the Mersey ( Helen Forrester's life as a child )

Most of which are mentioned here.

A Thousand Splendid Suns.

I found it so emotional that I would not be able to read it again.

I haven’t been able read War Horse for the same reason.