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- The Man throwing away his wedding ring and his wallet that contains a picture of his wife.
- The innumerable moments when the Man watches over the Boy (asleep or otherwise), noting how ghastly thin the child is and/or the hopelessness of their whole situation.
- Aside from the fact that the entire book is a Tear Jerker, the Man telling the Boy that he isn't the one who has to worry about everything all the time and the Boy saying "Yes I am. I am the one."
- Transitioned perfectly to The Movie, where Kodi Smit-McPhee is sure to tear your ventricles apart with his delivery.
- The Man stripping the bandit of his clothes at gunpoint as he begs for mercy. By the time the Boy convinces the Man to go back to return the thief's clothes, he is gone, so they just set the clothes on the ground with a single can of food on the off chance that he decides to come back. Made even worse by the fact that the thief didn't hurt the boy, he just took the food because he was hungry."Please mister, you don't have to do me like this..."
- When the Man dies in the end, and he apologizes for not being able to take care of the Boy anymore.
- The final passage. It doesn't say what happened to the Boy, but instead, it comes across as a sobering lamentation or an epitaph for the world and what's been forever lost. Of course, depending on one's interpretation, it may actually be hopeful, but it's just as easily heartbreaking (telling as it does of an Earth where humanity is just a blip among the eons).Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
