The 10 beste slotzinnen

The Guardian lijstte tien mooie slotzinnen uit klassiekers op: The 10 best closing lines of books - The most memorable literary payoffs, from the chilling to the poetic. Een daarvan komt uit To the Lighthouse van Virginia Woolf: “Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” Met deze woorden wordt de circle of consciousness van de protagoniste perfect afgesloten.

The 10 best closing lines of books 

1. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

2.  Ulysses - James Joyce

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

3. Middlemarch - George Eliot

"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."

4. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

 "The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness."

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

 "But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before."

6. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."

7. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."

8. Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

"There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady's bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship's funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen."

9. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

The Tale of Samuel Whiskers -  Beatrix Potter

 "But Tom Kitten has always been afraid of a rat; he never durst face anything bigger than – A Mouse."