Curtain Line
The last line of a scene, act or play, written to land as the lights go down.
A curtain line is the final spoken line before a scene ends or the curtain falls. In the well-made play of the nineteenth century it was a technical requirement: the line had to resolve the immediate tension, plant the next question, and give the audience something to carry into the interval.
Curtain lines are over-represented in quotation dictionaries for structural reasons. Dramatists put their most compressed writing there, and audiences remember what they heard last. A great deal of what people quote from Shakespeare and Ibsen comes from act endings.
The craft principle transfers to prose. Chapter endings, section breaks and the last sentence before a pull-quote all behave like curtains: readers grant them extra weight, so ambiguity or flatness there costs more than it would mid-paragraph.
Common mistake: quoting a curtain line as a character's settled belief. The line is engineered for exit force, and playwrights routinely give characters their most extreme formulation at exactly that moment.
“The rest is silence.”
Keep reading the glossary
A quotation presented as its own block, without an introductory clause running into it.
A short, eye-catching quote lifted from an article and displayed in large type for emphasis.
A rhetorical figure in which a sentence breaks off mid-thought, leaving the reader to complete it.
The short attributive phrase — 'she said', 'he replied' — that identifies the speaker of a line of quoted dialogue.