Ending A Book Quotes & Sayings

Writer's heaven is the place where you decide to rewrite your life the way you wish you had lived it. Because a writer's power, Marcus, is that he gets to decide the ending of the book. He has power over life and death; he has the power to change everything. Writers have more power in their fingertips than they imagine. All they have to do is close their eyes and they can change an entire lifetime. What might — Joel Dicker

Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes ... all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating. — Phil Cousineau

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound. — Willa Cather

My books have come many years apart and each one seems to reflect a period of experience. Ending the book is like putting a period on a certain movement. Interior and external - both. — Joan Larkin

Each book needs a good beginning and a good ending. People get pissed off when you don't close things off properly at the end. — Patrick Rothfuss

The best ending ever, for a science fiction book - or any novel, now that I think about it - was in Rendezvous With Rama. You know that you're at the end of the book and yet, there is no resolution. Then he hits you with those last six words. Better yet, the power is in the very last word. Wow! — John Gaver

The ending of a book is, in my experience, both the best and worst part to read. For the ending will often determine whether you love or hate the book.
Both emotions lead to disappointment. If the ending was good, and the book was worth your time, then you are left annoyed and depressed because there is no more book to read. However, if the ending was bad, then it's too late to stop reading. You're left annoyed and depressed because you wasted so much time on a book with a bad ending.
Therefore, reading is obviously worthless, and you should go spend your time on other, more valuable pursuits. — Brandon Sanderson

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or to us, nor the summers as golden. — Gene Wolfe

Wish my life were inside a book
So I could turn to the ending,
See if it is a love story
Or a gothic disaster. — Stasia Ward Kehoe

Sometimes a soldier returns home and all he can do is share his story in the hopes that somehow, in some way, it helps another soldier make sense of things. And although the stories may not be perfect, sometimes just sharing is enough to make a difference. — Michael Anthony

She's shaped her image of the world around someone else's fantasy ... Because it's easier. It's so much easier to say, 'This is a story, and there are heroes and villains, and there's an ending, and when we get there the book will close and we'll all live happily ever after. — Mira Grant

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it. — Rose Tremain

One way [to recovery] would be by creating the best possible romance book or happy ending scenario for you ... out od your own experience. Another way would be to look at it as it is: a wake-up call to action to create a more humane world, without discrimination and sexism. — Elina Juusola

Your life isn't some prerecorded movie where, no matter how many times you watch it, the ending remains the same. Your life is a book in progress, and you are the author. So if you don't care for the main character or the gloomy scenery or how the twisted plot is unfolding, then do something to change it. You write your own story. — Richelle E. Goodrich

A big book is like a serious relationship; it requires a commitment. Not only that, but there's no guarantee that you will enjoy it, or that it will have a happy ending. Kind of like going out with a girl, having to spend time every day with her - with absolutely no guarantee of nailing her in the end. No thanks. — Mick Foley

It's as if you had a story together and it was never finished. You never got to know the ending because a whole fucking chunk of the pages have been torn out of the back of the book. And it's so unfair." The — Jay Northcote

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings. — Flann O'Brien

Summer, dropping so easily a delicious everything upon your skin and lips. Like a never-ending kiss - taunting, deep, and luscious. — Carew Papritz

But the Fear (that sensation that all writers get of how the hell do words get from my puny little brain to into a book, and isn't magic somehow involved, and surely I'm not qualified to be involved in any part of that process, and I somehow managed that tomorrow, but you mean I have to do it this morning too, well how do I even start?) withdraws quite a bit when it's already light and lovely outside when I get to my desk. So I got right past that big moment today, and into the fun slide down towards the ending, yelling whee. — Paul Cornell

...A good Book, has no Ending... — E. E. Cummings

If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book! — Orson Welles

You can't change where you come from, but you can change where you go from here. Just like a book. If you don't like the ending, you can make up a new one. — Sarah Addison Allen

As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.' — Mark Billingham

Well," the voice said, seemingly oblivious, "one thing that does happen when you live a long time is that you start to realise the essential futility of so much that we do, especially when you see the same patterns of behaviour repeated by succeeding generations and across different species. You see the same dreams, the same hopes, the same ambitions and aspirations, reiterated, and the same actions, the same courses and tactics and strategies, regurgitated, to the same predictable and often lamentable effects, and you start to think, So? Does it really matter? Why really are you bothering with all this? Are these not just further doomed, asinine ways of attempting to fill your vacuous, pointless existence, wedged slivered as it is between the boundless infinitudes of dark oblivion book-ending its utter triviality?" "Uh-huh, — Iain M. Banks

What are you reading?" Owen asks.
"Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died."
"You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending. — Gabrielle Zevin

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief. — Chuck Palahniuk

Here's the thing, Judy. Here's the thing we have to look at and accept. For you, I was a chapter - a good chapter, maybe, or even your favorite chapter, but still, just a chapter - and for me, you were the book." "No, no, Willy, what you're saying about me - that's just not true," she said, but she didn't say what she thought was the truer, darker truth: that, to use his metaphor, he had been most of the book, but she had been too careless or self-absorbed or oblivious to know it, and it was too late to change the ending. — Tom McNeal

I want a good love story and a happy ending. Period. I don't want to deal with real life shit in a book. I'm reading to escape. — R.L. Griffin

In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world - God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator. — Fulton Oursler

Ramona wasn't at home anywhere. She felt like a spy in life and the ending of every great book and each orgasm, and the sight of every homeless shopping bag lady infected her with a titanic yearning for the world to make an unscheduled stop. — Ann Druyan

Instead he thinks up the worst ending imaginable: Hemingway has Catherine die from
hemorrhaging after their child is stillborn. It is the most torturous ending I have ever
experienced and probably will ever experience in literature, movies, or even television.
I am crying so hard at the end, partly for the characters, yes, but also because Nikki
actually teaches this book to children. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to
expose impressionable teenagers to such a horrible ending. Why not just tell high school
students that their struggle to improve themselves is all for nothing? — Matthew Quick

I can't go back to what we had in childhood. I can't relive those times, retrace my tracks and undo what's been done. It's not like writing a book and rewriting the ending to make it happier. — Patti Callahan Henry

My greatest wish
other than salvation
was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time. — Yann Martel

It is time to end a story that began in sorrow and ordeal and has ended in a deep and lasting happiness. May it be so for others. — Anne McCaffrey

There is an ending [to Infinite Jest] as far as I'm concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an "end" can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occured to you, then the book's failed for you. — David Foster Wallace

If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of lfe's possibilities, this is what they'd do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn't select. — Julian Barnes

I don't understand,' Dad says. 'You were such happy children.'

'I was never a happy child,' George says.

'True, but Henry was.'

'I'm not anymore. It's actually hard to imagine how my life could be any more shit at this point,' I say, and George holds up the copy of the book she's reading. The Road.

'Okay. Sure. It could get more shit if there was some kind of world-ending event and people started eating each other. But that's a whole different shit scale. On your average human-emotion scale, my life is registering as the shittiest of the shit. — Cath Crowley

Things happen, people change,' is what Amanda said. For her that covered it. You wanted an explanation, and ending that would assign blame and dish up justice. You considered violence and you considered reconciliation . But what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions, until all you can remember is a name. — Jay McInerney

In America there's a tendency to write the same book over and over because that's what sells. So in a way, my success in America has come at the expense of what I do. I haven't sold out, and I haven't taken the popular road to writing a best-selling book. I've really bucked the system. So it was necessary for me not to go and find the easy fans, the ones who want something digestible and fast with a happy ending that they can read over and over again no matter how many different books it is. I had to find fans who really wanted to think. Worldwide they all have that in common. — Steven Tyler

Whether or not the couple ends up together at the end of a book doesn't determine whether that book has a happy ending or not. As long as the two people end up happy, it doesn't really matter if they end up happy together. — Colleen Hoover

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or of shutting a book, did not end a tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: "It is simply a matter," he explained to April, "of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content. — Neil Gaiman

When I reflect on the stories of death supported by hospice care and contrast it with our story depicting an absence of support, I find myself dealing with envy and anger. I have channeled those emotions into this book with the hope that hearing our story might give someone else a chance to create a better ending to the life of a loved one. — Lisa J. Shultz

In literature, the reader standing at the threshold of the end of a book harbors no illusion that the end has not come - he or she can see where it finishes, the abyss the other side of the last chunk of text. Which means that the writer is never in danger of ending too soon - or if he does the reader has been so forewarned. This is the advantage a book has over a film - it is the brain that marshals forward the text and controls the precise moment of conclusion of the book, as the density of the pages thins. A film can end without you if you've fallen asleep or, because you can't wait any longer to use the bathroom, slipped out of the darkness of the theatre salon, and missed it. There will never be a form more perfect than the book, which always moves at your pace, that sits waiting for you exactly where you've left it and never goes on without you. — John M. Keller

When one is sitting in his bedroom and, happening to glance out the window, sees his little brother walking slowly down the driveway, he immediately jumps up, knocks over a stack of magazines piled up beside him, and runs through the doorway and down the hall. He throws open the front door, slams his body, against the screen, and hearing the tap tap tap behind him, jumps over the porch steps and down to the driveway. He stands several yards in front of his brother. He considers running, but doesn't. His arms and legs are shaking. His bottom lip between his teeth, he walks slowly and carefully, making not a sound. He stops, reaches one arm out, and pokes Gabriel Witter on the left shoulder with his index finger. He smiles the slightest of smiles.
Book Title #89: Where Things Come Back — John Corey Whaley

There's no happy ending ... Nevertheless, we might well say that is exactly Harriet Beecher Stowe's point. In 1852 slavery had not been abolished. Slaves were still on the plantations and many of them were in the hands of people like Legree. Her book was written to shame the collective conscience of America into action against an atrocity which was still continuing. So a happy ending would have been, frankly, a lie and a betrayal. ...

Most of the charges are basically true. Stowe did stereotype. She did sentimentalize. She offered a role model which later offended African American pride. On the other hand, what she did worked. She wasn't trying to provide a role model for African Americans. She was trying to make white Americans ashamed of themselves. ...

Perhaps the short answer to her critics is to ask, "Do you want glory, approval, all those good things? Or do you want to achieve your goal? — Thomas A. Shippey

I was very comfortable here, and getting on with my book. If you want to know, I am just writing an ending for it. I had thought of putting: and he lived happily ever afterwards to the end of his days. It is a good ending, and none the worse for having been used before. Now I shall have to alter that: it does not look like coming true; and evidently there will have to be several more chapters, if I live to write them. It is a frightful nuisance. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Clem rubbed at her face with her cuff and gave a quick, rueful smile. 'It's just so sad. It's the umpteenth time I've read it, and I will always think it will have a different ending. But it never does. — Anna Hope

It's interesting because when David Fincher was making "Fight Club," he said, "It's a romance." And it really is. Almost everything I ever write is just a romance. And that needed to be sort of pointed up at the end of "Fight Club." The film has a very different ending than the book does. — Chuck Palahniuk

Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count ... Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it ... Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself. — Brian Christian

It's a ridiculous book, filled with wicked fantasies and silly notions and improbable romance. But you ought to read the rest, just the same.'
'Why?'
'Because it has a happy ending. — Tessa Dare

Long Gone is the type of book that should come with a warning. It's a compulsively readable, highly addictive story. The ending will leave you breathless. — Karin Slaughter

A lot of people I know would hate that ending, but not me. I loved it. Mainly because I got to make the book happy. I decided they made it. They made it to the past. I decided the past was our world, and the future was their world. It was parallel worlds. — Lois Lowry

This book is a story of encounters between Reef peoples and places, ideas, and environments, over more than two centuries, beginning with James Cook's bewildered voyage through a coral maze and ending with the searing mission of reef scientist John "Charlie" Veron to goad us to act over the impending death of the Reef. — Iain McCalman

I tell everyone who asks me about writing ... almost everyone has an idea for a book, and some even have a great ending, but it's that 290 or so pages in between that are tough! — Brooklyn Hudson

Write the ending first and then you'll know before the opening sentence that it's going to be a good book. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The Occupy Wall Street collective is confused about what it wants but it wants it now! Some of the loonier demands from its independent thinkers: Striking all existing public and private debt from the books across the "entire planet"; elimination of all international borders; free college education; a guaranteed "living wage" for all regardless of employment; an end to free trade; trillions in additional spending for infrastructure and ecological restoration; and ending the fossil fuel economy. — Mike Rosen

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving. — Lev Grossman

Once I checked my email, I would get lost in a book so I could feel the main character's pain instead of mine, laugh at her missteps rather than lament my own, and cheer for the happy ending that seemed to elude me. — Meredith Schorr

Probably a good idea, let me know how it ends"
"I already know how it ends"
"You read the ending first?"
"I always read the ending before I commit to the whole book."
"If you know how it ends, why read the book?"
"I don't read for the ending. I read for the story". — Jayne Ann Krentz

Except you can't judge a book by its cover. Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl. A girl or a monster or both. Not everyone in a story gets a happy ending. Not everyone who reads a story feels the same way about how it ends. And if you go back to the beginning and read it again, you may discover it isn't the same story you thought you'd read. Stories shift their shape. The two sisters are waiting for the moon to come up, which is not the same thing as waiting for the sun to go down. Not at all. — Kelly Link

As we breathe and live, have a conversation, and you look in someone's eyes, and you see a sunset or have an argument or read a book or see a painting or whatever you do, it influences you. And as you live your art, it changes and grows just like you and your soul or whatever you want to call it. For me, it's never-ending, I call it "the organizer of chaos." That's what I do with this and I present it in a way that I dream. So basically, I'm just sharing my dreams with all of you. — Jared Leto

I've only cried at one book, but I'm too embarrassed to tell you which. It wasn't terribly intellectual. I will admit, though, to crying when I've read books aloud to my elementary class. We read a biography of Gandhi once, and it was very difficult to read the part where Gandhi was killed, because they were waiting for a happy ending. — Rebecca Makkai

I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you're reading, you're aware of the fact that there's only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. but with a film there's no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There's no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we're watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just...end. — David Lodge

Writing a book is just reading one, except you get to choose the perfect ending everytime! — Jennifer Squyres

These modern novels that leave everything unfinished annoy me ... "
"But things are often unfinished in real life," said Pat ...
"All the more reason why they should come right in books," said Uncle Horace testily. "Real life! We get enough real life living. I like fairy tales. I like a nice snug tidy ending in a book with all the loose ends tucked in. — L.M. Montgomery

I'm going to be super successful one day, and I'm going to write a book. It's going to be a kickass autobiography. And this is how it always happens in the book. This is just that part of the book where the character is going through hard times. This is that sucky part of the story. Just get through a few more pages, and it's going to have an amazing ending. — Ronda Rousey

The book is the book and it will always be there. It's a quiet ending. In the book it's a contemplative ending which I think you could certainly do that in a movie. — Jane Goldman

The first comic I can remember ever reading was a 'Fantastic Four' issue that my dad bought out of the drugstore once. The thing that struck me about it was that the ending wasn't an ending. It was essentially a cliffhanger. It was the first time I had ever read anything like that, where you read a book, but the book isn't the book. — Charles Soule

A level of a house, his father has told him, is called a story.
Nathaniel likes that. It makes him feel like may be he is living between the covers of a book himself. Like may be everyone in every home is sure to get a happy ending. — Jodi Picoult

There's a new children's book that's coming out that features Sarah Palin as a hero. I don't want to give away the ending, but we finally find out who shot Bambi's mother. — Conan O'Brien

And then she began to cry, and when I asked her why she was doing that, she said it was because I was to have a happy ending, and it was just like a book; and I wondered what books she'd been reading. — Margaret Atwood

I would suppose I learned how to write when I was very young indeed. When I read a child's book about the Trojan War and decided that the Greeks were really a bunch of frauds with their tricky horses and the terrible things they did, stealing one another's wives, and so on, so at that very early age, I re-wrote the ending of the Iliad so that the Trojans won. And boy, Achilles and Ajax got what they wanted, believe me. And thereafter, at frequent intervals, I would write something. It was really quite extraordinary. Never of very high merit, but the daringness of it was. — James A. Michener

In the opening a master should play like a book, in the mid-game he should play like a magician, in the ending he should play like a machine. — Rudolf Spielmann

And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?" "I think so." Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending." "Snap ending." Mildred nodded. "Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. — Ray Bradbury

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

I read a book twice as fast as anybody else. First, I read the beginning, and then I read the ending, and then I start in the middle and read toward whatever end I like best. — Gracie Allen

For once, I agree with Blake." Daemon met my shocked stare. "We can't, Kitten. Not now."
I wasn't okay with this, but I couldn't run down the hall, letting people free. We didn't plan for that and we only had a set amount of time. It sucked-sucked worse than people who pirated books, sucked more than a year for the next book in a beloved series, and sucked more than a brutal cliffhanger ending. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

In books and movies, all the loose ends are tired, things are resolved, mysteries are solved, they catch the killer, the boy gets the girl, a sick baby is miraculously healed. In reality it doesn't always work that way. The killer gets away, the girl is in love with another boy, things just get buried under new dramas and don't get resolved. Life is far more complicated than the life depicted in a book or a movie. — Cindy Vine

I have a fear of dying partway through a book - of never knowing the ending. It's silly, I know, but it makes me a quick reader. — Steve Robinson

Life isn't a book. There's no guarantee of a happy ending. — Kristin Cast

It gets you thinking about all the parts in a story we never see"
he cleared his throat
"the parts around the edges. You bring someone like that boy so alive before us and there he is set loose in our world so that we can't stop thinking of him. But then the report is over, the boy disappears. He was just a boy in a story and we never know the ending, we never get to close the book. It makes you wonder what happens to the people in them after the story stops
all the stories you've reported for instance. Where are they all now? — Sarah Blake

The journey is the mystery ... the destination the answer. If you don't have a happy ending yet, you have not finished reading the right book. — Shannon L. Alder

It's always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don't have a good ending, it's the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of 'The Kite Runner,' and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes. — David Benioff

The process of self-invention is never-ending; writer, like children, are always growing into their gifts. (Susan Larson in a "Times-Picayune" book review. — Susan Larson

It's one of my biggest memories of my father reading. I had pneumonia, remember, but I was a little better now, and madly caught up in the book, and one thing you know when you're ten is that, no matter what, there's gonna be a happy ending. They can sweat all they want to scare you, the authors, but back of it all you know, you just have no doubt, that in the long run justice is going to win out. — William Goldman

Here, in this book, I will try to show that the guru is actually like the horizon. A horizon is apparent - a line where earth and sky appear to meet. But in reality, they never meet. There is only an illusion of an ending point, a point of reference where we can stand and measure and assess. In this way, the guru is like a horizon between wisdom and method, myth and truth, science and faith. D — Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse

You don't need a happy ending to move onto a happy beginning. — Krystal McLean

To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story. — Sarah Addison Allen

Beside the sleeping Max, who was curled up like a little boy, knees tucked into his chest, mouth pursed into a surprised pout, lay Sanary's Southern Lights. Perdu picked up the slim volume. Max had underlined certain sentences in pencil and jotted some questions in the margins; he had read the book as a book ought to be read. Reading - an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind. Max had set out on that journey. With each book he would absorb more of the world, things and people. — Nina George

The Madingley paper56 represented a kind of closure for me, a climax to the first part of my scientific career, beginning in my early twenties and ending in my early thirties. At this point, I took off in an entirely new direction, never to return to those youthful mathematical pastures. That new direction, which was to define the rest of my career, and approximately the second half of my life, opened up with the publication of my first book, The Selfish Gene. — Richard Dawkins

At this point in the story, I feel obliged to interrupt and give you one last warning. As I said at the very beginning, the book you are holding in your hands does not have a happy ending. It may appear now that Count Olaf will go to jail and that the three Baudelaire youngsters will live happily ever after with Justice Strauss, but it is not so. If you like, you may shut the book this instant and not read the unhappy ending that is to follow. You may spend the rest of your life believing that the Baudelaires triumphed over Count Olaf and lived the rest of their lives in the house and library of Justice Strauss, but that is not how the story goes. — Lemony Snicket

Ending a book with a sequel in such a way that the reader still has faith in the characters and in the writer. That's finesse. — Shandy L. Kurth

wonder why I keep writing these chapter introductions. I spend a lot of time in these stories not actually writing these stories. There must be something to it. Something I don't want to admit. These are another delay. To keep myself from writing the inevitable. As long as I'm waxing fanciful about bunnies and bazookas, I don't have to make progress toward the ending. I don't want to get there. Despite claiming I'm writing these autobiographies to set the story straight, I don't actually want to do it. Deep down, I'd rather think of myself as a hero. Of course, I'm probably too much of a coward to include this section in the book. — Brandon Sanderson

Life is a Book. Make it a Great Ending.

We all have flaws, so why would life be flawless.

Progress to Success!! — Ki Allen

Oh, pride, pride. I was so wrong. It defeated me. It simply proved insurmountable. There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there's the weather, there's the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there's space, there's history. There's this thread or something caught between my teeth, there's the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there's time. And place. And there's you, Mrs. D. I wanted to tell part of the story of part of you. Oh, I'd love to have done that."
"Richard. You wrote a whole book."
"But everything's left out of it, almost everything. And then I just stuck on a shock ending. Oh, now, I'm not looking for sympathy, really. We want so much, don't we?"
"Yes. I suppose we do."
"You kissed me beside a pond."
"Ten thousand years ago."
"It's still happening. — Michael Cunningham

Some days I'm sure I'll be unravelled,
That I'm just a piece of thread,
Woven from everything I've heard
And every book I've ever read.
That someone will find my ending
Or a spot where I've worn thin,
And they'll pull me right apart
Back to the place where I begin,
Until they've found that every fibre
Isn't one to call my own,
Its from the thoughts and works of others
Thats I've been so crudely sewn.
And there's nothing I can make
Or think or do or be or say,
That isn't someone else
Woven in just a different way.
Then once I come undone,
Once who I thought I was grows small,
What if I look at all that's left
And there is nothing there at all? — Emily Hanson

Addie believes in books. They are more interesting than real life and easier to understand. Sometimes you can guess the ending. Things usually work out, and if they don't, you can always tell yourself it was only a book. — Kim Church

I wanted to read a book with a good ending so I wrote one. — Tom Stienstra

I want to see mountains again, Gandalf, mountains, and then find somewhere where I can rest. In peace and quiet, without a lot of relatives prying around, and a string of confounded visitors hanging on the bell. I might find somewhere where I can finish my book. I have thought of a nice ending for it: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days. — J.R.R. Tolkien

There was a different ending to 'New Moon' originally. It was a much quieter book. It was very much all in Bella's head. — Stephenie Meyer