Life And Beginnings Quotes & Sayings

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us. — Tillie Olsen

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

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence,
without you moving, slicing the noon
like a blue flower, without you walking
later through the fog and the cobbles,
without the light you carry in your hand,
golden, which maybe others will not see,
which maybe no one knew was growing
like the red beginnings of a rose.
In short, without your presence: without your coming
suddenly, incitingly, to know my life,
gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind:
since then I am because you are,
since then you are, I am, we are,
and through love I will be, you will be, we will be. — Pablo Neruda

Science can point out dangers, but science cannot turn the direction of minds and hearts. That is the province of spiritual powers within and without our very beginnings-powers that are the mysteries of life itself. — Oren Lyons

You'll reach a comfort zone in your life and start to wonder how you got there, how did you miss the sign posts that directed your real inner truth? Don't feel so guilty, you know when your meant to know and I guess that's the thing they don't teach you; when growing up, pain is inevitable but staying the same is a choice. Don't question why your feeling ready for something new, question why you stayed the same for so long. — Nikki Rowe

Every morning a new sun greets us and our new life begins. — Marty Rubin

But anyone can begin. It was the part with all the promise, the potential, the things I loved. More and more, though, I was finding myself wanting to find out what happened in the end.. — Sarah Dessen

[The Devil] And me? I suffer, and still I do not live. I am an x in an indeterminate equation. I am some sort of ghost of life who has lost all ends and beginnings, and I've finally even forgotten what to call myself ... You're eternally angry, you want reason only, but I will repeat to you once more that I would give all of that life beyond the stars, all ranks and honors, only to be incarnated in the soul of a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound merchant's wife and light candles to God. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Each morning is a new beginning of our life. Each day is a finished whole. The present day marks the boundary of our cares and concerns. It is long enough to find God or lose Him, to keep faith or fall into disgrace. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

One of the attractions of moving away into te life of employment, I think, is being disconnected and free, unbothered by membership. It is a life of beginnings without memories, but i is a life too that ends without being remembered. — Wendell Berry

Many ills of the Christian life are due to handicapped beginnings. Too many people are preaching a warped or truncated gospel, and spiritual birth defects are the inevitable result. — J. Edwin Orr

In the very center of your being, life begins in silence and in joy. — Debasish Mridha

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

Fear is to begin with the end in mind. There is no end. Life is eternal. Live life knowing that the end was your past, and the future is only full of beautiful beginnings through an eternity built around God's love. — Shannon L. Alder

They say when you reach a crossroad or a turning point in life, it really doesn't matter how we got there, but it's what we do next after we got there. Usually you arrive there by adversity, and then it is then and only then that we find out who we truly are and what we're truly made of. It's a process, a gift and a journey, and if we can travel it alone, although the road may be rough at the beginning, you find an ability to walk it. A way to start fresh again. It's neither a downfall nor a failure, but a new beginning. — Paris Hilton

People from all walks of life and all over the world look at me and know my humble beginnings and know that everything I've done has been through hard work. People respect me as a marketer and brand builder. — Sean Combs

In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities. — Arundhati Roy

Endings are abstruse, mystic and unreal. They are but depleted beginnings purposed to be substituted with newer ones.A transition of outlook and time, similar to our differing moods before and after slumber. Before the act we witness an exhaustion, a sulkiness but on gaining consciousness, we're rejuvenated and good humored. The wakefulness is the new beginning whereas the tension the disturbance we perceive each night is the weariness of the beginnings, of each day. So there never really is an end, all that there are are beginnings.Beginnings which are promising, which offer hope, which have a new leash on life, which neither denounce nor belittle rather soothe and console by reconstructing the broken pieces of yesterday, mending them and reinforcing them with courage and beauty like never before. — Chirag Tulsiani

Sure, things die. Yet hard on the heels of every death there comes a birth. And if the life around me is being perpetually refreshed in such a relentless manner, why would I think that the life within me can't have the same experience. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The firs day of high school is bullshit anyways. It's supposed to be about new beginnings, but really all it does is wreck your life. And set you up for failure. And make you realize everything is completely and totally fucked. — Lauren Barnholdt

It was not the same as charging down a machine-gun nest armed only with a Bowie knife, or strapping in to the tail-gunner seat of a four-engined heavy bomber. And no one else would ever know, since one did not get a medal for letting go of a woman's hand on a gray Saturday morning in the middle of a European war. But to have faith - that a lover would be constant and life clement - this did require courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations. As — Chris Cleave

For this very short time in your life, and possibly never again, you will be given a very unique gift: a supremely rich environment with ample time, space, safety and people to explore whatever interests you intensely, to push yourself, to make mistakes and recover from them, and to live as deeply as you'd like in the hope of finding yourself or, at least, the beginnings of yourself.
Such an opportunity may never present itself again. So, embrace it and ... Carpe College! — Michael Metzler

No straight lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends; There's no clear-cut beginnings; And so far no dead-ends. — Harry Chapin

New Beginnings are in order, and you are bound to feel some level of excitement as new chances come your way. — Auliq Ice

Our ancestry streches back through the life forms and into the stars, back into the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence and life. — Brian Swimme

Jesus had understands Jeremiah. Ecclesiastes said only that there is a time to weep and a time to laugh; but Jesus sees that only those who mourn will be comforted (Matt 5:4). Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life. Implicit in his statement is that those who do not mourn will not be comforted and those who do not face the endings will not receive the beginnings. The alternative community knows it need not engage in deception. It can stand in solidarity with the dying, for those are the ones who hope. Jeremiah, faithful to Moses, understood what numb people will never know, that only grievers can experience their experiences and move on. — Walter Brueggemann

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

A society that places a low value on its mothers and the process of birth will suffer an array of negative repercussions for doing so. Good beginnings make a positive difference in the world, so it is worth our while to provide the best possible care for mothers and babies throughout this extraordinarily influential part of life. — Ina May Gaskin

It is almost as if ideas set in mathematical form melt and become liquid and just as rivers can, from the most humble beginnings, flow for thousands of miles, through the most varied topography bringing nourishment and life with them wherever they go, so too can ideas cast in mathematical form flow far from their original sources, along well-defined paths, electrifying and dramatically affecting much of what they touch. pp. xii - xiii. — G. Arnell Williams

It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear any mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages. — Jack London

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I'm a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.
-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki — Andrew James Pritchard

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Life is endings and beginnings. — Amy Poehler

The idea of hunting and gathering as the best way for life has become quite popular recently, much more populare in some circles than the idea of simple farming as the best way of life. Many of the new primitives regard the beginnings of agriculture as one of humanity's major steps in the wrong direction. Most of the people who are drawn to such ideas do their actual hunting and gathering in grocery stores, but the *feeling* is there; it takes the form of a religion ... expressed by particpating in American Indian rituals - or primitive-style rituals that are created anew. — Walter Truett Anderson

My hope for all of us is that 'the miles we go before we sleep' will be filled with all the feelings that come from deep caring
delight , sadness, joy, wisdom
and that in all the endings of our life, we will be able to see the new beginnings. — Fred Rogers

Every shattered dream we give to Jesus is integrated into a higher and even more blessed purpose. In short, if we have faith to believe it, there are no wasted sorrows, no wasted aspirations or dreams. Even in this life, we see that God is continually reshaping whatever we give Him. Indeed, the Christian life is a series of new beginnings. God Himself rushes in to fill the vacuum left in the wake of our own disappointments. Dreams left unfulfilled in this life will most assuredly be fulfilled in the life to come. Jesus brought our dream of healthy bodies back with Him when He was raised from the dead. Take a long look at the person sitting next to you in church. Someday he or she will be like Jesus! "Because I live, you also will live" (John 14:19). To those who are brokenhearted, Jesus assures us that fulfilling family relationships will be ours. — Erwin W. Lutzer

Being loved sounds good in the movies, in books, in the memories of people who've survived the rough beginnings of their love. In real life, in the very beginning? It's every deep fear you've ever wanted to avoid all wrapped in the most intense happiness and pleasure you've ever dreamed possible. — Steph Campbell

It's a new day, a new beginning for your new life. With discipline you will be amazed at how much progress you'll be able to make. What have you got to lose except the guilt and fear of the past? — Jim Rohn

In the midst of life's ups and down, beginnings and endings, let us live our life, let us be joyful, let us be happy. — Debasish Mridha

Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious; holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Life. It begins and begins and begins. An infinite number of times. It is all beginnings until the end comes. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we do not, but, at every moment, life begins again. — Robin Black

Mariam kept her eyes to the ground, on her shadow, on her executioner's shadow trailing her.
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it. She wished she could she Leila again, wished to hear the clangour of her laugh, ...

Mariam wished for so much in those final moments.
Yet as she closed her eyes, it was not regret any longer but a sensation of abundant peace that washed over her. She thought of her entry into this world, the harami child of a lowly villager, an unintended thing, a pitiable, regrettable accident. A weed. And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who has loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. A mother. A person of consequence at last.
This was a legitimate end to a life of illegitimate beginnings."
--A Thousand Splendid Suns — Khaled Hosseini

The Grace represented the world of life, the world of the dead, and the way magic and Creation linked them. The outer circle of the design represented the beginning of the infinite world of the dead. Inside the outer circle was a square, its points just touching the outer circle. Inside the square was another circle, just touching the insides of the square. The area between those two circles with the square represented the world of life. The inside circle was life's beginnings, the outer circle its end, where souls crossed through the veil into the eternity of the underworld. An eight-pointed star inside the smaller circle was the Light of Creation. Lines from the star's points radiated out across the inner circle. the square. and across the outer circle that also symbolized the veil to the wold of the dead. The lines radiating outward from the Light represented the spark of the gift that journeyed with everyone from birth, through life, and on into death. — Terry Goodkind

It might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class - in this case an evening class on corporate identity and product branding - but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about our errands as usual and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending does not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does. — Mohsin Hamid

Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle. — Anna Quindlen

Hesse's Stage came to Perdu's mind. Most people were familiar with the first line, of course: "In all beginnings dwells a magic force..." but very few people know the ending: "For guarding us and helping us to live." And hardly anyone realized that Hesse wasn't talking about new beginnings. He meant a readiness to bid farewell. Farewell to old habits, Farwell to illusions. Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh. — Nina George

You have the power to shape your life the way you want it to be. Every though, every word, every action guides you with a purpose. And that purpose is to fulfill your destiny. Some may say you're just a dreamer. But everything imagined began with a dream. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at once. — Kurt Vonnegut

Most people, including yourself, apparently, think The Moldau is about a river. It is not. It is a metaphor. It is about the progress of life, from its fragile beginnings through its joys and turbulence and on to its end, its magnificent end. — Gerald Elias

In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

There is a fable in the forest
Whispered by the branches, as they blow.
A tale about the truth of leaving
Things that no longer help you grow.
For on the surface it looks simple,
Like you only need lace your boots,
But there is nothing quite as painful
As untangling your roots.
And proof is found in tree stumps
Of the price some pay to flee,
That they would cut their lives in half
To cut the time before they're free.
Yet from the little left behind
Life has been known to grow again,
For unless you take your roots
A part of you will still remain. — Erin Hanson

Life is depressing and hopeless enough, without imbibing further depression and hopelessness through story. I don't care how realistic people like to think that is. It's not what inspires me, or makes me love and cherish a book or a television show or a movie. When I am imbibing fiction, I want to be inspired. I want bold tales, told boldly. I want genuine Good People who, while not perfect, are capable of rising beyond their ordinary beginnings. To make a positive difference in their world. Even when all hope or purpose might seem lost. Because this is what I think fiction - as originally told around the campfires, through verbal legend - ought to do, more than anything else: Illuminate the way, shine a spiritual beacon, tell us that there is a bright point in the darkness, a light to guide the way, when all other paths are cast in shadow. — Brad R. Torgersen

It is not lies or a lack of loyalty that ends a relationship. It is the agonizing truth that one person feels in their heart on a daily basis. It is realizing that you are coping and not living. It is the false belief that there is a verse, quote, phrase or talk that will magically make you feel content, complete or not care. However, it doesn't last longer than a few days, before your mind and heart goes back to what it wants. It is the moment you realize that you left without ever leaving. It is the moment you realize that fear, shame or guilt is the only thing standing in the way of the life God meant for you to live. — Shannon L. Alder

And I make so many beginnings there never will be an end. — Louisa May Alcott

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy. — Alice Miller

In literature and in life we ultimately pursue, not conclusions, but beginnings. — Sam Tanenhaus

You win over people just like you win over a dog. You see a dog passing down the street with an old bone in his mouth. You don't grab the bone from him and tell him it's not good for him. He'll growl at you. It's the only thing he has. But you throw a big fat lamb chop in front of him, and he's going to drop that bone and pick up the lamb chop, his tail wagging to beat the band. And you've got a friend. Instead of going around grabbing bones from people ... I'm going to throw them some lamb chops. Something with real meat and life in it. I'm going to tell them about New Beginnings. — David Wilkerson

To have faith - that a lover would be constant and life clement - this did require courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations. — Chris Cleave

As I glanced around my room, sliding my dinosaur back and forth on its chain, I though that maybe that was the point--that instead of happy endings, you get beginnings. Hundreds of little beginnings happening every moment, each of them layering into histories deep and tangled and new, histories you count on to remain, no matter what changes the world throws at you. — Meg Leder

Those who love much, do much and accomplish much, and whatever is done with love is done well ... Love is the best and noblest thing in the human heart, especially when it is tested by life as gold is tested by fire. Happy is he who has loved much, and although he may have wavered and doubted, he has kept that divine spark alive and returned to what was in the beginning and ever shall be.
If only one keeps loving faithfully what is truly worth loving and does not squander one's love on trivial and insignificant and meaningless things then one will gradually obtain more light and grow stronger. — Vincent Van Gogh

If only we had the ability to live life as though it were so new or so close to the end that all we could do is give and show and become love. It seems that beginnings and endings teach us about this kind of love. It is in between that we tend to forget. — Michael Spehn

Beyond the pain, life continues to be sweet. The basics are still there. Beauty, food and friendship, reservoirs of love and understanding. Later, possibly not yet, you are going to need others who will encourage you to make new beginnings. Welcome them. They will help you move on, to cherish happy memories and confront the painful ones with more than bitterness and anger. — Rosamunde Pilcher

Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

According to the Buddha's teaching the beginning of the life-stream of living beings is unthinkable. THe believer in the creation of life by God may be astonished at this reply. But if you were to ask him 'What is the beginning of God?' he would answer without hesitation 'God has no beginning', and he is not astonished at his own reply. — Walpola Rahula

The journey from love to love. This is the journey all of us are on- what happens between teh beginning and end of the journey is your life. — Gary Zukav

We grow up with such an idealistic view on how our life should be; love, friendships, a career or even the place we will live ~ only to age and realise none of it is what you expected & reality is a little disheartening, when you've reached that realisation; you have learnt the gift of all, any new beginning can start now and if you want anything bad enough you'll find the courage to pursue it with all you have. The past doesn't have to be the future, stop making it so. — Nikki Rowe

you were to ask Christians around the world what God wants from the people he has saved, most would probably answer "obedience." There is great truth in that answer, but it is not enough. If the sovereign God's primary goal in sanctifying believers is simply to make us more holy, it is hard to explain why most of us make only "small beginnings" on the road to personal holiness in this life, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it (see Catechism Q. 113). In reality, God wants something much more precious in our lives than mere outward conformity to his will. After all, obedience is tricky business and can be confusing to us. We can be obedient outwardly while sinning wildly on the inside, as the example of the Pharisees makes clear. In fact, many of my worst sins have been committed in the context of my best obedience. — Barbara R. Duguid

The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds throughout the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way. — Carl Sagan

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

Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realise that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun. — Catherynne M Valente

If you could fly backwards into the past at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about half an hour to reach the time of Christ, and a little over three weeks to get back to the beginnings of human life. But it would take you twenty years to reach the dawn of the Cambrian period. — Bill Bryson

Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span ... — Isabel Allende

Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

He'd lived so long in anticipation of his own death that to contemplate his future was like standing at the edge of a cliff, staring into a vertiginous rush of open sky. — Helene Wecker

To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction. — Chaim Potok

To focus solely on endings is to trade conclusions for the very beginnings that created them. And if this cycle should persist, we will likewise miss the beginning that will follow this ending. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Full of God's thoughts, a place of peace and safety amid the most exalted grandeur and enthusiastic action, a new song, a place of beginnings abounding in first lessons of life, mountain building, eternal, invincible, unbreakable order; with sermons in stone, storms, trees, flowers, and animals brimful with humanity. — John Muir

That's the difference between life and art, of course. Life has no frames, no curtains, no beginnings and no endings. — Orson Scott Card

For what is life but a succession of change; of one thing after another; painful beginnings, fearful setting out into the unknown, leaving what we are for what we have not yet become. We sail forth boldly, keeping a steady keel and a keen eye on the horizon, to reach islands, land whose fragrance we sniff at at the edge of our dreams; and so we sail on, hoping that the next landfall will be our own bit of earth. — Suchen Christine Lim

And time inherently creates a story. Things begin and they end. How they end is the story. Or maybe it's what happens between when they begin and end that's the story. — Arianna Huffington

Let me digress a moment to talk about beginnings. How much simpler life would be if we were wise enough to stop at the first blush of romance, the start of a business transaction or a casual friendship. If we knew enough to pause and think: this is as good as it gets. Everything will go downhill from this moment on. So once again our instincts are the opposite of what they should be, propelling us forward exactly when they should be holding us back. — Francine Prose

But Promethea cares carnally about what she says. Watch out for words with her! Because Promethea is the person who has not cut the cord binding words to her body. Everything she says is absolutely fresh. Comes straight from the flesh of her lungs, the fibers of her heart. She doesn't know any other way of speaking. That is why her words are few and fiery. And all her sentences are strong and young and incandescent, because they are caused by a convulsion of her whole earthly body. Promethea's thought is of quivering red lava. And all her remarks date from the beginnings of life. Even concerning details she is cosmogonic. She moves easily to the ends of the earth, the places where life takes on form or loses it. — Helene Cixous

The road to Epidaurus is like the road to creation. One stops searching. One grows silent, stilled by the hush of mysterious beginnings. If one could speak one would become melodious. There is nothing to be seized or reassured or cornered off here: there is only a breaking down of the walls which lock the spirit in. The landscape does not recede, it installs itself in the open places of the heart j it crowds in, accumulates, dispossesses. You are no longer riding through something - call it Nature, if you will - but participating in a rout, a rout of the forces of greed, malevolence, envy, selfishness, spite, intolerance, pride, arrogance, cunning, duplicity and so on.
It is the morning of the first day of the great peace, the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender, I never knew the meaning of peace until I arrived at Epidaurus. Like everybody I had used the word all my life, without once realizing that I was using a counterfeit. — Henry Miller

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. — Rebecca West

Come the revolution, however, mesmerism was reconceived once more. From its beginnings many had seen it as an aristocratic fad: Mesmer (by this stage long gone to Germany and Switzerland) had made a fortune from the nobility, charged the huge fee of 100 livres for admission to his Society of Universal Harmony, and even been offered a pension for life by Marie-Antoinette. — Mike Jay

Ends are not bad things, they just mean that something else is about to begin. And there are many things that don't really end, anyway, they just begin again in a new way. Ends are not bad and many ends aren't really an ending; some things are never-ending. — C. JoyBell C.

A man in his early prime contemplates on life, shattered by the distortions of society he gazes ahead in time. There were vows of happiness and fairy tale beginnings. Now there is nothing of that sort; now there is nothing that started the tales so bright. It's after all this while that he understands why fairy tales begin with 'once upon a time'... — Adhish Mazumder

What inspires me is anxiety and the quest to try to change things in my life ... I got addicted to endings and beginnings and to the idea of always moving around ... Obviously, whenever you're going through something that's the best time to create, if you're going through something amazing, or horrible, or nothing at all you should be creating. Unfortunately the songwriters of today generally torture themselves to make sure they're writing good songs and take it a little too seriously. — Kevin Drew

But now that so much is changing, isn't it time for us to change? Couldn't we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child's toy-box and please him and no longer please him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like dilettantes, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which has always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing? — Rainer Maria Rilke

There's something of a restorative quality about spring, where something whispers wild rumors of new beginnings arising from the seemingly dead seeds in our lives. There's something almost cruel about it all, as if there might be some sort of truth about a new life actually being possible. Yet, maybe it is true. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

May Light always surround you;
Hope kindle and rebound you.
May your Hurts turn to Healing;
Your Heart embrace Feeling.
May Wounds become Wisdom;
Every Kindness a Prism.
May Laughter infect you;
Your Passion resurrect you.
May Goodness inspire
your Deepest Desires.
Through all that you Reach For,
May your arms Never Tire. — D. Simone

When a tree is polled, it will sprout new shoots nearer its roots. A soul that is ruined in the bud will frequently return to the springtime of its beginnings and its promise-filled childhood, as though it could discover new hopes there and retie the broken threads of life. The shoots grow rapidly and eagerly, but it is only a sham life that will never be a genuine tree. — Hermann Hesse

It is clear to you, I know, Lucilius, that no one can lead a happy life, or even one that is bearable, without the pursuit of wisdom, and that the perfection of wisdom is what makes the happy life, although even the beginnings of wisdom make life bearable. — Seneca.

NEW YEAR


All endings have beginnings.
All beginnings have their end.
Sometimes our cards bring us winnings,
Sometimes the dealer's not our friend.

Time can bring us sadness.
Time can bring us joy.
But let it not bring madness.
Never be Time's toy.

Now the year has gone.
It cannot be redone.
At least we carried on.
Regrets? Let us have none.

A glorious New Year beckons,
Seducing with its hope.
Its day, its hours, its seconds,
All have happiness within their scope.

Be glad for what Life dealt,
Cards of joy, or cards of pain.
You were alive and felt.
You may not pass this way again — Carl Martin Johnson

A river is nearly the ultimate symbol for the very essence of change itself. It flows unceasingly from one point of being to another, yet continuously occupies the same bed or pathway, and accommodates life's endings with the same musical grace with which it accommodates life's beginnings, along with all the muted and explosive moments that surface between the two extremes. — Aberjhani

Losing this part of my life, this time of being a mother to growing children, is indeed an ending. For months, I've carried that quiet sorrow, getting used to its heaviness, the way one learns to live with the chronic soreness of a joint, a tenderness in wrist or knee. What I long to do now is to let the sadness go as well, to have faith that even as my sons graduate from high school and leave home, and this phase of our family life draws to a close, there will be new beginnings not just for them, but for all of us. — Katrina Kenison

From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson's political life - from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics - his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits. — Robert A. Caro

Endings are thus formally unappealing to me, more than beginning or ending, in life, I enjoy continuing. Continuing is my only focus or concern. — Brian D'Ambrosio

Generosity, generosity, generosity, must be the beginning and ending of our life — Cornelia Connelly

Beginnings are apt to be shadowy and so it is the beginnings of the great mother life, the sea. — Rachel Carson