“"Life has to end." Marguerite said. "Love doesn't"”
Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
Quotes about end page 17
“Victory to the spider. Patience wins the day. And today my patience ends. (Apollymi)”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist
Source: The Dream Hunter
“The final end of Eternity, and the beginning of Infinity”
Isaac Asimov The End of Eternity
Source: The End of Eternity
“Call no day fortunate till it be ended.”
Nulla dies felix
Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) English writer and publisher
The Fifth Queen Crowned
Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist
Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
T.S. Eliot book Four Quartets
Variant: We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.
Source: Four Quartets
“In the end we're all Springer guests, really, we just haven't been on the show.”
Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor
“The future would end up finding out the truth about the past.”
Paulo Coelho book Like the Flowing River
Source: Like the Flowing River
“Why live life from dream to dream? And dread the day when dreaming ends.”
Baz Luhrmann (1962) Australian film director, screenwriter and producer
Source: Moulin Rouge!: The Splendid Book That Charts the Journey of Baz Luhrmann's Motion Picture
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads"
1910s
Context: Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.
Emily Giffin (1972) American writer
Source: Love the One You're With
Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic
Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer
Source: Point Counter Point (1928), Ch. 26; note: the character Mark Rampion, a writer, painter and fierce critic of modern society, is based on D. H. Lawrence.
Source: The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell
Context: The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.... The thoroughly contemptible man may have valuable opinions, just as in some ways the admirable man can have detestable opinions.... Many intellectuals, of course, don’t get far enough to reach the obvious again. They remain stuck in a pathetic belief in rationalism and the absolute supremacy of mental values and the entirely conscious will. You’ve got to go further than the nineteenth-century fellows, for example; as far at least as Protagoras and Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the nonintellectuals have always remained.... these nonintellectuals aren’t the modern canaille who read the picture papers and... are preoccupied with making money... They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted—that there’s an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even (since the physical, intuitive, instinctive and emotional part of man doesn’t contribute appreciably to making money or getting on in an industrialized world) positively harmful and detestable.... The nonintellectuals I’m thinking of are very different beings.... There were probably quite a lot of them three thousand years ago. But the combined efforts of Plato and Aristotle, Jesus, Newton and big business have turned their descendants into the modern bourgeoisie and proletariat. The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn’t of course the same as the obvious of the nonintellectuals. For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life. Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality. The intellectuals who, like Rampion, don’t have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
Ellen Schreiber (1967) American writer
Source: The Coffin Club
“And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.”
Junot Díaz book This Is How You Lose Her
Source: This Is How You Lose Her
“Who am I? And how, I wonder, will this story end?”
Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook
Source: The Notebook
Source: Bel-Ami
Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer
Source: Working for the Devil
“Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson book Experience
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Experience
Context: Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.
“Start making excuses and there's no end to it. I can't live that kind of life.”
Haruki Murakami book South of the Border, West of the Sun
Source: South of the Border, West of the Sun
“Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.”
Jack Kornfield (1945) American writer
Source: Buddha's Little Instruction Book
Sarah Dessen book That Summer
Source: That Summer (1996)
Context: Maybe not, she said as we came to the car. But maybe that isn't so bad. You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends. The first boy is always the hardest to get over, Haven. It's just the way the world works.
“In the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.”
Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer
“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer
Dean Koontz book The Darkest Evening of the Year
Source: The Darkest Evening of the Year
Sara Zarr (1970) American children's writer
Source: Sweethearts
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor
"Confessions of an unromantic man," Redbook magazine, Vol. 176, Iss. 4, (Feb 1991): 62.
“If you need a helping hand, you can find one at the end of your arm.”
Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) film, stage, and television actress
“I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.”
Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects
Source: Sharp Objects
“You live you die and death not ends it.”
Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors
An American Prayer (1978)
Variant: We live, we die
and death not ends it
Context: O great creator of being
grant us one more hour to
perform our art
and perfect our lives The moths & atheists are doubly divine
& dying
We live, we die
and death not ends it
“All of us yearn for the highest wisdom, but we have to rely on ourselves in the end.”
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer
Source: Sackett's Land (1974), Ch. 4
“Immortals are, by definition, immortal. End of story.”
Richelle Mead (1976) American writer
Source: Succubus Blues
Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter
Source: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
“I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.”
Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer
“Either give me your hand, or end it now, and put us both out of our misery”
Judith McNaught (1944) American writer
Source: Paradise
