Ending As You Began Quotes & Sayings

It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy. — Hunter S. Thompson

The muscles in his arms and back trembled as he pushed in as deep as he could go, until all of him was buried inside her. His head sagged and a deep, primitive snarl ripped free. Sparks of light exploded behind her tightly closed lids. His hands burrowed into her hair, holding her head still while he kissed her hard and deep and wild. Then he began to move. Hard, steady strokes that ignited every nerve ending in her body. — Kaylea Cross

The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight. — Charles Baudelaire

So the world ended.
And the next one began.
They were infinite.
They were the beginning and the ending; they were eternity. — Sarah J. Maas

We are all at risk of something. Of ending up exactly where we began, of failing to imagine and find and know and actualize who we could be. The only difference is the distance of the leap. — Cheryl Strayed

Since human beings first began to write, they have recorded their wish for an idealized ending some call the "good death," as if any of us can ever be sure of it or have any reason to expect it. There are pitfalls of decision-making to be sidestepped and varieties of hope to seek, but beyond that we must forgive ourselves when we cannot achieve some preconceived image of dying right. — Sherwin B. Nuland

was Superman. He jumped off a building - a skyscraper, no less - thinking he could fly away, and died when he found that he couldn't. I don't know if he was wearing his super suit at the time. Noel Thomas's story began with the same ending, though the means weren't so dramatic. She sat in my office, slim black purse on the floor next to her, hands folded on her lap, and calmly related that her father had killed himself. She wanted to know why. — Judy K. Walker

I searched for a deeper existence. What I found was myself. The next moment the journey towards self discovery began all over again. — Matthew Donnelly

I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or athlete must feel when, after years of commitment to a particular dream ... he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grownup and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic. — Barack Obama

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I'm often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I'm back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way. — Ron Rash

As we began working toward the finale of 'Lost,' I knew there was no possible ending that was going to be universally loved, and I accepted that. We ended the story the way we wanted it to end, and we stand by it. On my Twitter feed, I still get ten to fifteen positive comments for every negative one. — Carlton Cuse

A century that began with children having virtually no rights is ending with children having the most powerful legal instrument that not only recognizes but protects their human rights. — Carol Bellamy

Mr Letterman, 66, would retire when his contract to host the CBS network's Late Show With David Letterman expires next year, ending a run as a late-night host that began in 1982 on NBC. — Anonymous

For a long while, he sat on the steps and sharpened the chain-saw blade with a round file, dipping it in bar-and-chain oil and raking it over each tooth with sleek, grating sounds. He lost himself in the rhythm of the labor. A victory over tears is a small thing, but it was his. The sky went from indigo to blackness, and he saw nothing ominous in it, nothing but cold stars wheeling in their course, a course determined by the same firm hand he hoped was guiding his own. But satellites, too, crossed the sky in sly, winking arcs. Sull knew that. He could not let himself be confounded. He went inside, to sleep beside his wife. — Matthew Neill Null

We're not quite ending where we began, but close enough.
Close enough. — Stephen King

You came back," He said, as if that were an answer.
They joined hands.
So the world ended.
And the next one began.
They were infinite.
They were the beginning and the ending; they were eternity.
The king standing before them gaped as the shield of flame died out to reveal Aelin and Dorian, hand in hand, glowing like newborn gods as their magic entwined.
"YOUR MINE," the man raged. He became darkness; folded himself into the powers he carried, as if he were nothing but malice on a dark wind.
He struck them, swallowed them.
But they held tighter to each other, past and present and future; flickering between an ancient hall in a mountain castle perched above Orynth, a bridge suspended between glass towers, and another place, perfect and strange, where they had been crafted from stardust and light.
A wall of night knocked them back. But they could not be contained.
The darkness paused for a breath.
They erupted. — Sarah J. Maas

Taking a deep breath, George turned around taking in the unspectacular panorama. A tear moved slowly down his cheek. To George this was where it had all began. And where it was now ending. His biggest regret was not making peace with his family. All those years and now he'd reached the last moments of his life without saying the things he needed to say. Without making the effort he should have done. Years of taking things for granted. — Emily Organ

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns. — Bertrand De Jouvenel

Mrs. Murdo, walkind even more briskly to keep her spirits up, was crossing Harken Square when something fell to the pavement just in front of her with a terrific thump. How extraordinary, she thought, bending to pick it up. It was sort of a bundle. She began to untie it. — Jeanne DuPrau

The reverend bishop, knowing that Pelagia found it easier to think with her knitting in her hands, told her, "You may knit." The pointed steel needles began clacking furiously and Mitrofanii frowned as he recalled what dreadful creations those deceptively deft hands brought into the world. At Eastertide the sister had presented the bishop with a white scarf adorned with the letters CA for "Christ is Arisen," rendered so crookedly that they seemed already to have celebrated the ending of the fast with some gusto. "Who is this for?" His Grace — Boris Akunin

But the story I'm telling here began the day I discovered the affair between Mark and Thelma, and it ended exactly six weeks later. It has a happy ending, but that's because I insist on happy endings; I would insist on happy beginnings, too, but that's not necessary because all beginnings are intrinsically happy, in my opinion. What about middles, you may ask. Middles are a problem. Middles are perhaps the major problem of contemporary life. — Nora Ephron

The Caribbean is such an apocalyptic place, whether it's the decimation of the indigenous populations by the Europeans, whether it's the importation of slaves and their subsequent being worked to death by the millions in many ways, whether it's the immigrant processes which began for many people, new worlds ending their old ones. — Junot Diaz

There was something incongruous about one marriage ending the same day another began, as if there was an exchange program in the universe or something, a trade required in order to keep the numbers even. — Sarah Dessen

He grabbed me with both hands and began pushing me backward.
I lost my balance. The ledge was at an angle, and it was covered with loose gravel. I was less than a foot from the edge.
It was at that very moment that the clouds parted. The September sun burst through. The entire world was illuminated.
Time shattered into moments.
I could see for a hundred miles in every direction.
I could see mountain peeks and pristine lakes. And I could somehow feel as well as see the never-ending drop that toyed with me, ruffling my hair, pulling at my back, one step behind me. — Axel Avian

I don't pay attention to the
world Ending.
It has ended for me
many Times
and began again in the morning. — Nayyirah Waheed

Ever since they left Thies, the women had not stopped singing. As soon as one group allowed the refrain to die, another picked it up, and new verses were born at the hazard of chance or inspiration, one word leading to another and each finding, in its turn, its rhythm and its place. No one was very sure any longer where the song began, or if it had an ending. It rolled out over its own length, like the movement of a serpent. It was as long as a life. — Ousmane Sembene

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

Men always failed Maman in the end. They forever fell disastrously short of whatever ideal she held them up to. What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits and the flinging of cooking utensils and collapse. High drama. Maman was incapable of either starting or ending a relationship without excess. — Khaled Hosseini

The world began in ending, and it will end in beginning. — Jacqueline Carey

Everything in a movie completed. Relationships began, they developed and they ended or went on happily forever. All in less than two hours. Life, though, was not like a movie, it was ragged, an outdated map with new streets added whose direction you could never quite discern, or a maze filled with suddenly appearing walls and aimless corridors. Even when a movie didn't have a happy ending, it had a logical ending that you could live with. Life had endings that you didn't know were endings, or endings that thought were endings and then they weren't. — Marshall Thornton

As the wildly favorable word of mouth spread, however, the box office receipts began to soar. First, fans of musicals came. Then the ever-growing cadre of Julie Andrews devotees. Finally, those longing for a happy ending - anywhere - began to turn out in droves. At which point the oddest thing of all happened: all these fans of the movie returned to see it again. And then once more. And then once again - until the phenomenon eventually resulted in a record-setting first release run of over four and a half years. — Tom Santopietro

Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that. — Rick Perlstein

Bringing the workbook to publication also meant an ending. An ending of many days and hours of interaction with Tyrone. I knew the day would bring that ending when we began but as it crept closer I felt the weight of hesitation as much as the excitement of relief. I found myself with thoughts like, "it will never be the same again as it is now" and "I am not sure I want this interaction to end". I love that man dearly and will forever be changed from knowing him. Handing our diligent work over to Kendall-Hunt for publication was as if I was handing the entirety of the relationship over. — Paula Heller Garland

In spring training prior to his 1995 rookie season, Chipper was already so confident in who he was as a player that he famously deadpanned to veteran slugger Fred McGriff, after the Crime Dog grounded into an inning-ending double play, these two words: "Rally killer." His confidence carried over to the field, just as it had since he began playing as a kid - he batted .265, and he led all rookies with 23 home runs, 87 runs, and 86 RBIs. Hideo Nomo was Rookie of the Year for the Dodgers, but Chipper and the Braves were World Champions. — Tucker Elliot

We had traveled far and long to get here but were still the same still-born, unreconstructed people who had once met on this landscape that began somewhere not too far south of the south and ended all the way up in the northernmost extremes of the north, and every soul begotten upon this land was a bastard child of that interminable human equation: colonizer and colony, slave and master, rapist and victim, and any pledge to loyalty and patriotism was an oath to both parts of this equation - we were the seconds obliviously turned up on the old, unregenerate battlefield, here to fight in history's redundant, never-ending duel, always carrying someone else's sword and flag in the name of the myth. — John M. Keller

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