Closing Lines

It’s been said (meaning I can’t remember where I read it) that the opening lines of a book sell the book, and the closing lines sell the next book.

Here are a few memorable closing lines.

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

• Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. — Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead. — Don DeLillo, White Noise

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. — Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

• Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody. — J.D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye

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