Closing Lines: Eliot’s Middlemarch
The inestimable Byron Borger pointed to a recent feature in The Guardian: “The 10 best…closing lines of books.” All of them are a treat, but the closing line from Eliot’s Middlemarch (a book, incidentally, that I think is instructive for contemporary discussions about science and religion) deserves to be highlighted (and is too long to be tweeted!):
“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.”
