“It’s a long time since I drank champagne.”

These are Anton Chekhov’s last words, and the Guardian has a slideshow of some sometimes funny, sometimes chilling last words of quite a few literary figures.

(And while we’re talking about slideshows, I’d actually recommend the Jacket Copy write-up instead of the Guardian’s, because slideshows drive me freakin’ bonkers. Slideshows are for photography only, people. PHOTOGRAPHY!)

Among some other great ones:

“What’s that? Do I look strange?” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“I must go in. The fog is rising.” — Emily Dickinson

“I feel certain that I’m going mad again.” — Virginia Woolf

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Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.

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