...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”

(Final epigraph in Terence Malick's "A Hidden Life")