A Quote by John Galsworthy
The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.
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The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
I always begin [a novel] with outlines, but they change and so do my endings and beginnings.
Software is definitely engineering. It's different in that we take on novel tasks every time. It's not like building a certain bridge that is virtually identical to some previous bridge or some previous building.
In life, the number of beginnings is exactly equal to the number of endings ... In poetry, the number of beginnings so far exceeds the number of endings that we cannot even conceive of it.
Partings are the beginnings of new meetings. Beginnings happen because there are endings.
It's lonely to say goodbye. Very lonely. Partings are the beginnings of new meetings. Beginnings happen because there are endings…Meetings. Beginnings. It's not too late…to believe in them after the fact.
Endings are beginnings, and beginnings are ours to turn into something good.
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It's everything in between we live for.
Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered.
It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that.
I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.
Writing a novel is not so much a project as a journey, a voyage, an adventure.
I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster. … The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius.
Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.
When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.
I'm a firm believer in stories with arcs and beginnings and endings and all that. 'Scott Pilgrim' is sort of one long novel, and it's so long that I get confused and sort of tread water sometimes. But there's definitely a goal to it. People who just dismiss it as shallow, that's their prerogative, but it's not really my intent.
Perhaps one could appoint three or four professional people specially concerned with the task of bridge building between the majority and the minority. Bridge building of this kind requires an effort from both sides. It's no good if the majority alone do it. The question is whether there is any response, whether people on the other side of the river also wish to try to build a bridge.
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