Best Last Lines.

Several weeks ago, WORLD Magazine held a contest for readers to submit their favorite endings from literary works. The judging panel received several hundred entries, and in the end, chose more than one submission as the winner. I couldn't choose a favorite either, and have therefore listed several of my favorites below. Enjoy!

"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

"There was some one things that was too great for God to show us when we walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was his mirth."
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

"... and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Everyone!"
-Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

"He turned out the light, and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning."
-Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

"And today the great Yertle,
that Marvelous he,
Is King of the Mud. That
is all he can see.
And the turtles, of course
...all the turtles are free
As turtles and, maybe, all
creatures should be."
-Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle

"Adventures are funny things. They offer dark, uncertain times, forks in the road and choices between comfort and peril. And in such times, heroes can be made or undone."
-Wayne Thomas Batson, The Rise of the Wyrm Lord

"All their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
-C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle