Source: A Great and Terrible Beauty
“Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.”
"Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote" (January 1955)
Tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Dreamtigers (1960)
Variant: In the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.
“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”
Source: Middlemarch (1871)
Context: Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.
“All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.”
Source: The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Not necessarily in that order.”
“As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end.”
As quoted in The Cyclopaedia of Practical Quotations: English and Latin (1894) edited by J. K. Hoyt and Anna L. Ward, p. 508
Context: As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
