Dreyer's English - Benjamin Dreyer 2022

Outro: By way of conclusion

I think perhaps you don’t finish writing a book. You stop writing it.

My favorite last line in all literature has long been this, from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse:

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

I lack, by far, Lily Briscoe’s certainty, though I recognize her exhaustion.

An early title for this book was The Last Word, which was soon discarded for any number of excellent reasons, one of them being that there is no last word. There’s no rule without an exception (well, mostly), there’s no thought without an afterthought (at least for me), there’s always something you meant to say but forgot to say.

There’s no last word, only the next word.