Quotes & Sayings About Beginnings Of Stories

Life has no happy endings, actually, no endings at all, just an ongoing series of beginnings. A story - whether it's happy or sad, whether it makes sense or not, what its meaning is - depends entirely on where you start it and where you end it. — Judith Ryan Hendricks

I like to tell stories that have beginnings, middles and ends. — Eric Kripke

We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). — Susan Cain

I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing. — Candace Bushnell

At the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). Those who live the most fully realized lives - giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves - tend to find meaning in their obstacles. In a sense, McAdams has breathed new life into one of the great insights of Western mythology: that where we stumble is where our treasure lies. — Susan Cain

Well then, I'm going to tell you a secret almost every newspaper man and woman who's been at it awhile knows: in real life, the number of actual stories - those with beginnings, middles, and ends - are slim and none. But if you can give your readers just one unknown thing (two at the very outside) and then kick in what Dave Bowie there calls a musta-been, your reader will tell himself a story. — Stephen King

Believe it or not, stories don't function in terms of beginnings, middles and ends, they simply have beginnings, middles, and ends. — Film Crit Hulk!

We give people political labels, sexual labels, and religious labels. But in the process, we strip them of their individuality and complexity. Prejudice is pre-judging. It's assuming that bad stories end badly, but Jesus is in the business of turning bad beginnings into happily ever afters.
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God cannot give up on you. It's not in His nature. His goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. All you have to do is turn around. All you have to do is crash the party! — Mark Batterson

All love stories are tales of beginnings. When we talk about falling in love, we go to the beginning, to pinpoint the moment of freefall. — Meghan O'Rourke

Though I continue to tell stories about Iraq, I sometimes fear this makes me a fraud. I feel guilty about the sorrow I feel because I know it is manufactured, and I feel guilty about the sorrow I do not feel because it is owed, it is the barest beginnings of what is owed to the fallen. — Phil Klay

Toy is talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories that crisscross and contradict and dead end.
Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation. — Erica Lorraine Scheidt

There are others. There will be others. Other heroes, other heroines. Other prophecies to fulfill, other adversaries to despise. There will be stories told and forgotten, and reinvented anew until one day, perhaps, the oldest are remembered, and the beginning may end, and the ending begin. — Jacqueline Carey

I lost my voice and my best friend too
On swift, fierce winds and wings of blue,
The cold rain fell where beams had shone,
So I wrapped up tight and safe. Alone.

But I missed my friend, I missed my voice,
And my heart still whispered of another choice
To break out of my binding, safe, and warm,
And see what the world looked like after the storm.

So I struggled free and was greeted by
Colorful brushstrokes across the sky,
The melody of the summer breeze
And blue wings like mine in hazel trees.

On the soft, sweet air of the mountain glade,
We gathered together in cool, green shade,
And told our stories, beginnings to ends,
And found our song in the hearts of new friends. — Elaine Vickers

God is going to send you someone that will rescue you. Then one day you will rescue them in return and together your story will rescue others. He has always been a God of rescues and a maker of warriors for his grace. You only need to believe that you are part of something greater than you know. — Shannon L. Alder

Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done. — Cameron Dokey

Besides, she likes my stories. They are like fairy tales, I suppose, full of kings and queens and adventures. Ma says people think fairy tales are simple stories but they are not. I guess I agree. My trouble is I have no talent for thinking up plots. The best I can do is come up with a good beginning. My book of story ideas is really just a book of story beginnings. Still and all, that is something. — Kristin Kladstrup

You must liberate your mind of such dogmatic ideals, rid yourself of this unending illusion that stories have clear beginnings and endings. Stories never begin, nor do they end. They are comprised of people living an endless cycle of interacting, influencing each other, and parting ways. As long as stories are told they should not have clear endings. — Ryohgo Narita

There was a man here, lashed himself to a spar as his ship went down, and for seven days and seven nights he was on the sea, and what kept him alive while others drowned was telling himself stories like a madman, so that as one ended another began. On the seventh day he had told all the stories he knew and that was when he began to tell himself as if he were a story, from the earliest beginnings to his green and deep misfortune. The story he told was of a man lost and found, not once, but many times, as he choked his way out of the waves. And the night fell, he saw the Cape Wrath light, only lit a week it was, but it was, and he knew that if he became the story of the light, he might be saved. With his last strength he began to paddle towards it, arms on either side of the spar, and in his mind the light became a shining rope, pulling him in. He took hold of it, tied it round his waist, and at that moment, the keeper saw him, and ran for the rescue boat. — Jeanette Winterson

It's hard to say where a story begins and ends. You have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. Somewhere between perception and reality. Between what is spoken and what is heard. Between what is written and what is edited out. I know this, you can't have an ending without a beginning. Even if they are really just random pieces of the middle that tend to stand out. Staccato notes on the page. Points on a circle. — Thomas Lloyd Qualls

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. — Catherynne M Valente

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings. — Aidan Chambers

While tributes to Americans who had lost their lives in battle had been held in a number of towns across the nation, one of the more well-known stories about the beginnings of Memorial Day is the story about General John Logan. — John Linder

I love the short story for being round, suggestive, insinuating, microcosmic. The story has both the inconvenience and the fascination of new beginnings. — Luisa Valenzuela

This picture highlights the way Genesis is not limited to just one situation or set of perspectives. Instead, it is a chorus of different voices, a distillate of ancient Israel's experiences with God over the centuries, wrien in the form of continually adapted stories about beginnings. — Anonymous

'Monkeys' is made up of nine short stories that tell an overall story. 'Folly' is a series of vignettes all put together to tell a larger story. In 'Lust and Other Stories,' there are nine stories - three, three, three; the beginnings of love, the middles, and the afters. — Susan Minot

The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning. — James Plath

But don't you think there some stories that are more alive than that? When you put certain books back on the shelf, don't you feel as if the people inside are going on with their lives after the story is over?" Lucy felt that way about most of the books she loved. — Kristin Kladstrup

There are no beginnings, not even to stories. There are only places where you make an entrance into someone else's life and either stay or turn and go away. — Timothy Findley

Tracing the beginnings of the interwoven stories of science can be arbitrary, as beginnings are so often lost in the mists of time. — Elizabeth Blackburn

I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings. But any story will do. — Katherine Applegate

Stories don't end," he says. "They just turn into new beginnings." (pg. 123) — Lindsay Eagar

I never finished any of my early stories. They were all beginnings, an endless number of beginnings. — George R R Martin

There is no ending to this story because, as I've realised, stories don't have endings, only beginnings. — Shirley Marr

I'm a firm believer in stories with arcs and beginnings and endings and all that. 'Scott Pilgrim' is sort of one long novel, and it's so long that I get confused and sort of tread water sometimes. But there's definitely a goal to it. People who just dismiss it as shallow, that's their prerogative, but it's not really my intent. — Bryan Lee O'Malley

Whoever wants to tell a variety of stories ought to have a variety of beginnings. — Marie De France

There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exits, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They're not being kept secret from us, but they're secret all the same. — John Darnielle

All stories end when they have returned to their beginnings. — Justin Cronin

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. — Wallace Stegner

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death. — Gene Wolfe

What's important on a comedy show, or any show, is that some stories have to go somewhere. There have to be ends to the beginnings and middles you create. But sometimes it's like a way station on the highway, then the actual thing doesn't have to be this giant, climactic, life-changing, game-changing thing. — Michael Schur

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again. — A.E. Van Vogt

Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends. — A.S. Byatt