No Beginning No End Quotes & Sayings

Look, and it can't be seen.
Listen, and it can't be heard.
Reach, and it can't be grasped.
Above, it isn't bright.
Below, it isn't dark.
Seamless, unnamable,
it returns to the realm of nothing.
Form that includes all forms,
image without an image,
subtle, beyond all conception.
Approach it and there is no beginning;
follow it and there is no end.
You can't know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.
Just realize where you come from:
this is the essence of wisdom. — Lao-Tzu

Love is an endless ocean, with no beginning or end. Imagine, a suspended ocean, riding on a cushion of ancient secrets. — Rumi

I have no companion but Love, no beginning, no end, no dawn. The Soul calls from within me: 'You, ignorant of the way of Love, set Me free.' — Rumi

I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end. — Stephen Hawking

Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern. Why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? — William Hazlitt

Here's what I know about political campaigns: no matter what you map out at the beginning, it's always different at the end. — Chris Christie

Despite what you've read, your sadness is not beautiful. No one will see you in the bookstore, curled up with your Bukowski, and want to save you.
Stop waiting for a salvation that will not come from the grey-eyed boy looking for an annotated copy of Shakespeare,
for an end to your sadness in Keats.
He coughed up his lungs at 25, and flowery words cannot conceal a life barely lived.
Your life is fragile, just beginning, teetering on the violent edge of the world.
Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth.
Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor. — Emily Palermo

In the technology sector failure is often a precondition to future successes, while prosperity can be the beginning of the end. If the rise and fall of BlackBerry teaches us anything it is that the race for innovation has no finish line, and that winners and losers can change places in an instant. — Jacquie McNish

The grace of God is infinite and beyond our ability to measure. His grace has no beginning and therefore no end. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

The sun was just coming up over the mountains--blood red and cold. I felt as if I was standing in the mightiest cathedral that had ever been built. There was no end to it, and no beginning. All I could do was look at it and worship. — Robert Specht

The tavern haunter wanders lonely in a desert
And sees the whole world as a mirage.
The desert is limitless and endless --
No one has seen its beginning or its end,
And even if you wandered in it a hundred years
You would not find yourself, or anyone else.
Those who live there have no feet or heads,
Are neither "believers" nor "unbelievers."
Drunk on the wine of selflessness,
They have given up good and evil alike.
Drunk, without lips or mouth, on Truth
They have thrown away all thoughts of name and fame,
All talk of wonders, visions, spiritual states,
Dreams, secret rooms, lights, miracles. — Mahmud Shabistari

And even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate, as we have just seen I think ... Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names. I say that now, but after all what do I know now about then, now when the icy words hail down upon me, the icy meanings, and the world dies too, foully named. All I know is what the words know, and the dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. And truly it little matters what I say, this or that or any other thing. Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. To hell with it anyway. — Samuel Beckett

For the same reason that the Ancien Regime is thought to have an end but no beginning, the Revolution has a birth but no end. — Francois Furet

Yet though time is cyclic, it is not repetitive; there is no other time within which it can repeat itself. For time is but an abstraction from the successive-ness of events that pass; and since all events whatsoever form together a cycle of successive-ness, there is nothing constant in relation to which there can be repetition. And so the succession of events is cyclic, yet not repetitive. The birth of the all-pervading gas in the so-called Beginning is not merely similar to another such birth to occur long after us and long after the cosmic End, so-called; the past Beginning is the future Beginning.

When we are in full possession of our faculties, we are not distressed by this fate. For we know that though our fair community must cease, it has also indestructible being. We have at least carved into one region of the eternal real a form which has beauty of no mean order. — Olaf Stapledon

Inventors and geniuses, at the beginning of their careers (and very often at the end as well), have almost always been regarded in society as no more than fools - that is a most routine observation, well known to everyone. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Time is an ocean
without any bottom.
We are getting lost
while searching for an atom.
Time is a river
without any beginning or end,
one way flow of life,
without any stop or bend.
Time is rocking and moving
Like a rocking chair.
Life is beginning and ending
but going no where. — Debasish Mridha

Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor - never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. — Elie Wiesel

People were like dogs and this was why they took pity on them
dogs alone all the hours of their days and always waiting. Always waiting for company. Dogs who, for all of their devotion, knew only the love of one or two or three people from the beginning of their lives till the end
dogs who, once those one or two had dwindled and vanished from the rooms they lived in, were never to be known again.
You passed like a dog through those empty houses, you passed through empty rooms ... there was always the possibility of companionship but rarely the real event. For most of the hours of your life no one knew or observed you at all. You did what you thought you had to; you went on eating, sleeping, raising your voice at intruders out of a sense of duty. But all the while you were hoping, faithfully but with no evidence, that it turned out, in the end, you were a prince among men. — Lydia Millet

Personally of course I regret everything.
Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need,
not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy,
not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust,
not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear,
not a name, not a face, no time, no place ... that I do not regret, exceedingly.
An ordure, from beginning to end. — Samuel Beckett

Knowledge has a beginning but no end. — Geeta Iyengar

On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed by the different hamlets, some of them having originally grown up from a common root, and then become divided by secession, some having been alien from the beginning. West Egdon believed in Blooms-End time, East Egdon in the time of the Quiet Woman Inn. Grandfer Cantle's watch had numbered many followers in years gone by, but since he had grown older faiths were shaken. Thus, the mummers having gathered here from scattered points, each came with his own tenets on early and late; and they waited a little longer as a compromise. — Thomas Hardy

I saw behind me those who had gone, and before me, those who are to come. I looked back and saw my father, and his father, and all our fathers, and in front, to see my son, and his son, and the sons upon sons beyond.
And their eyes were my eyes.
As I felt, so they had felt, and were to feel, as then, so now, as tomorrow and forever. Then I was not afraid, for I was in a long line that had no beginning, and no end, and the hand of his father grasped my father's hand, and his hand was in mine, and my unborn son took my right hand, and all, up and down the line stretched from Time That Was, to Time That Is, and is not yet, raised their hands to show the link, and we found that we were one, born of Woman, Son of Man, had in the Image, fashioned in the Womb by the Will of God, the eternal Father.
I was one of them, they were of me, and in me, and I in all of them. — Richard Llewellyn

Inherent in architecture, it involves everything in life so that there is absolutely no end to it. By the time you're seventy or eighty, you're still beginning. So, that's the kind of life I've preferred to being the expert at forty and dead, you know. — John Lautner

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means? — T. S. Eliot

Suddenly, quietly, you realize that - from this moment forth - you will no longer walk through this life alone. Like a new sun this awareness arises within you, freeing you from fear, opening your life. It is the beginning of love, and the end of all that came before. — Robert Frost

Unlike return, however, risk is no more quantifiable at the end of an investment that it was at its beginning. Risk simply cannot be described by a single number. Intuitively we understand that risk varies from investment to investment: a government bond is not as risky as the stock of a high-technology company. But investments do not provide information about their risks the way food packages provide nutritional data. — Seth Klarman

The world has no circumference. It would certainly have a circumference if it had a centre, in which case it would contain within itself its own beginning and end; and that would mean that there was some other thing which imposed a limit to the world - another being existing in space outside the world. All of these conclusions are false. Since, then, the world cannot be enclosed within a material circumference and centre, it is unintelligible without God as its centre and circumference. — Nicholas Of Cusa

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun. — G.K. Chesterton

We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery ... it asks that we participate rather than plan. — Margaret J. Wheatley

It seems probable to me that God, in the beginning, formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportions to space, as most conduced to the end for which He formed them; and that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them, even so very hard as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God had made one in the first creation. — Isaac Newton

There is no action of man in this life that is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences as no human providence is high enough to give a man a prospect in the end. And in this chain, there are linked together both pleasing and unpleasing events in such manner as he that will do anything for his pleasure must engage himself to suffer all the pains annexed to it. — Thomas Hobbes

Alone also with the horizon. The waves come from the invisible East, patiently, one by one; they reach us, and then, patiently, set off again for the unknown West, one by one. A long voyage, with no beginning and no end ... — Albert Camus

But even more so, it reminded me that this was all really happening. Stanford. The end of the summer. The beginning of my real life. It was no longer just creeping up, peeking over the horizon, but instead lingering in plain sight. — Sarah Dessen

Betsy Trotwood don't look a likely subject for the tender passion, but the time was, Trot, when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given him. He was a fine-looking man when I married him", said my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone. "I was a fool; and I am so far an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I wouldn't have even this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was. There, my dear. Now, you know the beginning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won't mention the subject to one another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story, and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot! — Charles Dickens

As regards structure, comedy has come a long way since Shakespeare, who in his festive conclusions could pair off any old shit and any old fudge-brained slag (see Claudio and Hero in Much Ado) and get away with it. But the final kiss no longer symbolizes anything and well-oiled nuptials have ceased to be a plausible image of desire. That kiss is now the beginning of the comic action, not the end that promises another beginning from which the audience is prepared to exclude itself. All right? We have got into the habit of going further and further beyond the happy-ever-more promise: relationships in decay, aftermaths, but with everyone being told a thing or two about themselves, busy learning from their mistakes. So, in the following phase, with the obstructive elements out of the way (DeForest, Gloria) and the consummation in sight, the comic action would have been due to end, happily. But who is going to believe that any more? — Martin Amis

In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended. — Robert Henri

Today is tomorrow, and present is past.
Nothing exists and everything will last.
There is no beginning, there was no end.
No depth to fall, no height to ascend.
There is only this moment, this flicker of light
That illuminates nothing, but oh! So bright!
For we are the spark that flutters in space,
Consuming an eternity of a moment's grace.
For today is tomorrow and present and past.
Nothing exists and everything will last. — Jane Roberts

The book of nature has no beginning, as it has no end. Open this book where you will, and at any period of your life, and if you have the desire to acquire knowledge you will find it of intense interest, and no matter how long or how intently you study the pages, your interest will not flag, for in nature there is no finality. — Jim Corbett

Ever feel like you're always winding up and never throwing it out? You might blame it on perfectionism or procrastination or preparation. You may even call it prudent. But whatever it is...IT'S NOT WORKING. I call this phenomenon "petrified performance." Where you're busy, busy, busy (on the wrong activities or the right activities for too long), and never accomplishing the idea or task you set out to do. You're stuck. Like a tree that once was lively is now dead and immovable like a stone. What once was a fluid idea is now frozen in time. How do you overcome petrified performance? With practice, silly. Everything you do should be considered a "project" because projects have a beginning and an end with a timeline. No more dreaming. Wake up and put those dreams to work by putting the steps necessary to make them happen on the calendar. Are you willing to practice? That's my prescription. — Richie Norton

The indolence I love is not that of a lazy fellow who sits with his arms across in total inaction, and thinks no more than he acts, but that of a child which is incessantly in motion doing nothing, and that of a dotard who wanders from his subject. I love to amuse myself with trifles, by beginning a hundred things and never finishing one of them, by going or coming as I take either into my head, by changing my project at every instant, by following a fly through all its windings, in wishing to overturn a rock to see what is under it, by undertaking with ardor the work of ten years, and abandoning it without regret at the end of ten minutes; finally, in musing from morning until night without order or coherence, and in following in everything the caprice of a moment. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It marked the beginning and, of course, an end. At that moment a chapter, no, a whole stage of my closed. Had I known, and had there been a spare second or two, I might have allowed myself a little nostalgia. — Ian McEwan

There is no shame is asking for help. We accept the fact that those at the end of life and those at the beginning of life require assistance, yet we somehow believe that adults should be able to be independent in spite of hardship. — Lisa Arends

I found solitary confinement the most forbidding aspect of prison life. There is no end and no beginning; there is only one's mind, which can begin to play tricks. Was that a dream or did it really happen? One begins to question everything. — Nelson Mandela

No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education. — John Cowper Powys

You are a writer - you write one chapter and go on to the next and the next and so forth. You manage the story, you control the ending, no one else. Think about it. The only difference between life and fiction is you cannot rewrite the beginning, but the ending is always within reach. While you write you think how the story will end. Do you make it an ending with no regrets? — Patrick Timm

They were one unto the other, a circle whirling evenly, effortlessly, endlessly. He knew beauty and the intensity of a dream and he was meshed in a womb he called happiness. He did not think: This must come to an end in time. A circle had no beginning or end; it existed. He did not allow thought to enter the hours that he waited for her, laved in memory of her presence. He seldom left the apartment in those days. In the outside world there was time; in time, there was impatience. Better to remain within the dream. — Dorothy B. Hughes

You're searching ...
For things that don't exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings - there are no such things.
There are only middles. — Robert Frost

[A]s soon as you try and take a song from your mind into piano and voice and into the real world, something gets lost and it's like a moment where, in that moment you forget how it was and it's this new way. And then when you make a record, even those ideas that you had, then those get all turned and changed. So in the end, I think, it just becomes it's own thing and really I think a song could be recorded a million different ways and so what my records are, it just happened like that, but it's not like, this is how I planned it from the very beginning because I have no idea, I can't remember. — Regina Spektor

Let me tell you a few things about regret ... There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? — Janet Fitch

Death is believed to be inauspicious in some foreign lands to the west of us; to them it signifies the end of everything. But nothing ever really dies. No material can ever truly escape the universe. It just changes form. In that sense, death is actually also the beginning of regeneration; the old form dies and a new form is born. If the south is the direction of death, then it is also the direction of regeneration. — Amish Tripathi

You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? I've given more thought to this question than you could begin to imagine. — Janet Fitch

He talks about how the word "no" should be the "end of the discussion, not the beginning of a negotiation. — Amy Poehler

The eating of meat was unknown up to the big flood, but since the flood they have put the strings and stinking juices of animal meat into our mouths, just as they threw in front of the grumbling sensual people in the desert. Jesus Christ, who appeared when the time had been fulfilled, has again joined the end with the beginning, so that it is no longer allowed for us to eat animal meat. — St. Jerome

Life to most of us is just a jumble of sensations, like a very bad film with no plot, no real beginning and end. — Anthony Burgess

No power of earth, or hell, men or devils, can possibly stand against the word of God; and hence it is the very height of folly and wild madness for any one to set up his thoughts or reasonings in opposition to the plain statements of Holy Scripture; and, on the other hand, it is the beginning and end of all true wisdom to submit in all things to the absolute authority of that Word which is settled forever in Heaven. — Charles Henry Mackintosh

Saying the universe is eternal simply is saying that it has no beginning or end, not that it had a beginning an infinite time ago — Victor J. Stenger

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. They turned the pain of others into memories of one's own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. — Roberto Bolano

Depression simply is. It has no beginning and no end, no boundaries and no world outside itself. It is the first, the last, the only, the alpha and the omega. Memories of better times die upon its desolate shores. Voices drown in its seas. The mind becomes its own prisoner. — Alexis Hall

No bit of the natural world is more valuable or more vulnerable than the tree bit. Nothing is more like ourselves, standing upright, caught between heaven and earth, frail at the extremities, yet strong at the central trunk, and nothing is closer to us at the beginning and at the end, providing the timber boards that frame both the cradle and the coffin. — Seamus Heaney

And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable - all is meaningful; nothing is small - all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, no too small.
And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again. — Olive Schreiner

There's something in human nature, I'm beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It's like looking - or talking - through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken. — Alan Bradley

You hate America, don't you?'
That would be as silly as loving it,' I said. 'It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will. — Kurt Vonnegut

If, as you teach, the universe has no beginning and no end, why should we? — Janet Morris

Until a man has found God, he begins at no beginning and works to no end. — H.G.Wells

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end. — Kurt Vonnegut

Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. "I feel it's insane," he says, and his voice drops. "This chick tells me there's no meaning to life but it doesn't matter, we'll just flow right out. There've been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it's going to happen." He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. "Here you know it's not going to."
I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.
"I don't know," he says. "Something. Anything. — Joan Didion

It's not that there is no small talk ... It's that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end ... Sensitive people ... 'enjoy small talk only after they've gone deep' says Strickland. 'When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else. — Susan Cain

Love rests on no foundation. It is an endless ocean, with no beginning or end. — Rumi

The Vale is not real.

It's a lie told by mothers and fathers to give their starving children a reason for the horror. There is no reason.

There is nothing but this world. It is our beginning and our end. Our one chance at joy before the dark. — Pierce Brown

There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death. — Neil Gaiman

It wasn't love right away, because nothing ever is no matter what the songs say, but it was the start of it. A beginning in one way, and the end in another. I think that might always be true of love. — Amy Garvey

If time has no beginning and no end, everything is happening, will happen, has happened, at the same moment. All eternity in a single moment. — Shekhar Kapur

Now everything was changed. She walked about with cautious, anxious steps, staring constantly at the ground, on the lookout for things that crept and crawled. Bushes were dangerous, and so were sea grass and rain water. There were little animals everywhere. They could turn up between the covers of a book, flattened and dead, for the fact is that creeping animals, tattered animals, and dead animals are with us all our lives, from beginning to end. Grandmother tried to discuss this with her, to no avail. Irrational terror is so hard to deal with. [p. 136] — Tove Jansson

But Philippa was hardly listening. "It's a riddle," she declared finally, pointing to the card in the strange little round window. "I think that if we answer the riddle we can get in. Listen 'The beginning of eternity. The end of time and space. The beginning of every end. And the end pf everyplace."
John shrugged. "I don't get it."
"No, but I do," Philippa said triumphantly. "The answer is the letter e. E is the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space, the beginning of every end, and the end of everyplace. — P.B. Kerr

The ultimate singularity is the Big Bang, which physicists believe was responsible for the birth of the universe. We are asked by science to believe that the entire universe sprang from nothingness, at a single point and for no discernible reason. This notion is the limit case for credulity. In other words, if you can believe this, you can believe anything. It is a notion that is, in fact, utterly absurd, yet terribly important. Those so-called rational assumptions flow from this initial impossible situation. Western religion has its own singularity in the form of the apocalypse, an event placed not at the beginning of the universe but at its end. This seems a more logical position than that of science. If singularities exist at all it seems easier to suppose that they might arise out of an ancient and highly complexified cosmos, such as our own, than out of a featureless and dimensionless mega-void. — Terence McKenna

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white ... Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!
Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven. — Anne Rice

Nothing stayed, nothing ever changed. But love, only love, that was the true part of the story, no matter what the beginning, middle or end. — Selena Kitt

That is how I came to think that heavy and hard was the beginning of living, real living; and though I might not end up with a mark on my cheek, I had no doubt that I would end up with a mark somewhere. — Jamaica Kincaid

No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

No. You can't understand. Because you're reading the last chapter of something without having read the first chapter. You're a little guy, Bode. Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when they're usually coming in at the end. — Joe Hill

What is faith? It is a memory. Of a time when all was perfect in the world. When there was no fear and no judgment and no death. It is a memory of a time before we were born, a beacon to guide us back from the end to the beginning, to the memory of where we came from. It is a memory of a promise made before the earth was formed, before the stars glittered in the primordial sea. A promise that says that we will remember what we have learned on this journey so that we may return full circle, the same and yet different. Older. Wiser. Filled with compassion for others. And for ourselves. What is faith? It is the memory of love. — Kamran Pasha

Life is pure farce from beginning to end, with a little
black comedy thrown in for shade. If it was anything
else, mankind would have stuck his collective head in
the gas oyen years ago. No one could tolerate seventy
years of tragedy. When I die - probably of cancer -
Jane has prornised to put on my tombstone: "Here
lies Anne Cattrell who laughed her way through it.
The joke was on her but at least she knew it." (The Ice House) — Minette Walters

There were three of these women, separated by short intervals of pain, remorse, and despair. When he and the last one had their final quarrel - she threw the breadboard - he was nearly fifty-five, and he gave up on love, save the memory of it. Always his aim had been marriage. He had never entered what he considered to be an affair, something whose end was an understood condition of its beginning. But he had loved and wanted for the rest of his life women who took him in their arms, and even their hearts, but did not plan to keep him. He had known that about them, they had told him no lies about what they wanted, and he had persisted, keeping his faith: if he could not change their hearts, then love itself would. — Andre Dubus

The house became full of love. Aureliano expressed it in poetry that had no beginning and no end. He would write it on the harsh pieces of parchment that Melquiades gave him, on the bathroom walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable. — Virginia Woolf

You can't find the end of infinity. There is no end. So if you can't tack space onto the end of infinity, you have to create space at the beginning. — Amy Harmon

So here we are.
The end of the road.
No. The beginning of the next. — Sarah J. Maas

What did it matter, since it was unreality, all of it, the pain and desire, the beginning and the end? There was no reality except this solitary road, this quite solitary road, along which on went rather puzzled, rather tired ... — H.G.Wells

No one stands at the beginning of a race and then finds himself at the end having never taken a step forward. And if that were to happen - the sweat and struggle avoided - what stories would he have to tell? The goal includes the journey; it's all part of the dream. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Your mistake, indeed the mistake of your inherently finite senses, is to view the universe as an extension of yourself. You expect that, like you, it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. but what you fail to understand is that everything you consider to be you, except for that rather silly imaginary part you call consciousness, is merely bits and pieces borrowed from the universe, and to the universe it will all return. You had no beginning, and you will have no ending. Everything that is you has always been and will always be. — A. Lee Martinez

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight. — Elias Canetti

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind
and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town. — William Faulkner

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first. — Benjamin Franklin

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness — Edward Gibbon

Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end,
full of new paths to discover,
where mystery remains eternal — Pierre Boulez

His eyes were staring at the lonely sun that was now beginning its descent behind some far off hills. How lonely its existence was, Ranjan mused. Traveling every single day from East to West, with no break, no company; nothing to wait for, nothing to look forward to, just going on and on, in a cycle of existence that did not have a beginning or end. — Yamini Vijendran

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 one time. — Kurt Vonnegut

I see a bird carrying me and carrying you, with us as its wings, beyond the dream, to a journey that has no end and no beginning, no purpose and no goal. I do not speak to you, and you do not speak to me; we listen only to the music of silence. Silence is the friend's trust of friend, imagination's self-confidence between rain and rainbow.
A rainbow is inspiration provoking the poet, uninvited, the infatuation of the poet with the prose of the Quran.
Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown?
We are absent, you and I; we are present, you and I.
And absent.
Which of your Lord's blessings do you disown? — Mahmoud Darwish

They would place their hands together inside the circle so that they could walk in each other's dreams. It forged a bond that could not be broken. The circle represents love in eternity. For there is no beginning and no end.
— Libba Bray

As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn't even have a crumb to eat. There's a vivid scene in Nanni Loy's The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans - even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy. — Sophia Loren