Quotes About Beginnings

Poetry -- literature in general -- is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes. Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth... in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.

Some of the best fiction writers got their start writing airline menus.

Everyday begins like a blank chalkboard, on which each one of us can write the poem of our present and our dreams for the future.

Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. He who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia.

To progress is always to begin always to begin again

The cinema began with a passionate, physical relationship between celluloid and the artists and craftsmen and technicians who handled it, manipulated it, and came to know it the way a lover comes to know every inch of the body of the beloved. No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of its beginnings.

Guitarists always start in the bedroom

All the earth is made anew-- Far the false, and fair the true-- Where a little life begins, Free of sorrow, free of sins, And Baby comes.

Love is like war; begin when you like and leave off when you can

Red", I write "is the color of life. It's blood, passion, rage. It's menstrual flow and after birth. Beginnings and violent end. Red is the color of love. Beating hearts and hungry lips. Roses, Valentines, cherries. Red is the color of shame. Crimson cheeks and spilled blood. Broken hearts, opened veins. A burning desire to return to white.

Don't wait for something big to occur. Start where you are, with what you have, and that will always lead you into something greater.

Books were about movement. They were about quests and journeys. Beginnings and middles and ends, even if not in that order. They were about new chapters. And leaving old ones behind.

If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line." [ Paris Review , interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]

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.

First novels were always at least somewhat autobiographical,

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. —Ann Patchett, from the essay The Sense of an Ending

Nothing ever begins when you think it does. You think you can trace something back to its roots but roots by definition never end. There's always something that came before: soil and water and seeds that were born of trees that were born of yet more seeds.

Life begins only when we cross the borders and not definitely before!

In the beginning, people prayed to the Creatress of Life, the Mistress of Heaven. At the very dawn of religion, God was a woman. Do you remember?

Though perhaps it is a kind of faith, a return to the beginnings to see if what was lost may again be found. In solitude, in exile, we come to know what cannot otherwise be known; we remember what we saw and see it for the first time.

Each day is a lifetime. In the morning we are born. The day lies before us: vast and bright and new.

Hearing a story awakens the mythic story living in each of us. It places us in a "mythic condition" that reconnects us to the core imagination and living story at the center of our soul. Being touched by myth carries us to the center where the world is always ending and always beginning again.

Strange questions are the more interesting ones. Children by and large don't try to trip you up... they want to find out how you do this funny thing that you do... if they've loved a story they love to know how it started.