The last sentence of Dickens's Little Dorrit may be my favorite last sentence in all of the books I have ever read. When I finished the novel (again) last night, all I could do was close the cover and lay both hands on it and let the tears prickle behind my eyelids. I felt as if I were listening to the one line of a song that, no matter where I am in this life, comes back to me and back to me, the one line that tells the story of every song and every listener, now and forever.

They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted, and chafed, and made their usual uproar.