Finality Quotes - Page 2

The resurrection blasts apart the finality of death, providing an alternative to the stifling, settling dust of death and opens the way to new life.

Billy Graham

Dust, Way, New Life

Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Donna Lee Toney (2011). “Billy Graham in Quotes”, Thomas Nelson Inc

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The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

Sylvia Plath

Doors, Novel, Manic

Sylvia Plath (1994). “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”

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'What I believe' is a process rather than a finality. Finalities are for gods and governments, not for the human intellect.

Emma Goldman

Believe, Government, Anarchy

Emma Goldman, Candace Falk (2008). “Emma Goldman”, p.340, University of Illinois Press

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One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what it is.

Sue Monk Kidd

Life, Forgiving, One Day

Sue Monk Kidd, Ann Kidd Taylor (2009). “Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-daughter Story”, Viking Press

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When your fight has purpose - to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent - it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling - when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event - there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.

Tea Obreht

Hate, Fighting, Attachment

"The Tiger's Wife". Book by Tea Obreht, 2009.

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It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

William Faulkner

Children, Emotional, Long

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For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year's end.

Hal Borland

Fall, Autumn, Years

Hal Borland (1946). “An American year: country life and landscapes through the seasons”, New York

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Just — just to be clear,” he said. “You want to leave Tonks at her parents’ house and come away with us?” “She’ll be perfectly safe there, they’ll look after her,” said Lupin. He spoke with a finality bordering on indifference. “Harry, I’m sure James would have wanted me to stick with you.” “Well,” said Harry slowly, “I’m not. I’m pretty sure my father would have wanted to know why you aren’t sticking with your own kid, actually.

J. K. Rowling

Father, Kids, House

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The struggle to emerge out of the past, clean of memories; the inadequacy of our hearts to cut life into separate and final portions; the pain of this constant ambivalence and interrelation of emotions; the hunger for frontiers against which we might learn as upon closed doors before we proceed forward; the struggle against diffusion, new beginnings, against finality in acts without finality or end, in our cursedly repercussive being.

Anais Nin

Pain, Memories, Struggle

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It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.

Barbara Taylor Bradford

Pain, Believe, Grief

Barbara Taylor Bradford, Sue Monk Kidd (2001). “Of love and life: three novels selected and condensed by Reader's Digest”

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No more Dane,” he eventually said with unnerving finality. I tried to be funny. “I can't decide if that means you don't want me to see him again or if you're planning to kill him.” “It means if the first thing happens, the second thing is likely to follow.

Lisa Kleypas

Mean, Want, Firsts

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I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period).

Sarah Vowell

Running, Thinking, Long

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the old alone have finality. What is true of the young today may be false tomorrow. They are enveloped in emotion; and emotion as a state of being is fluent and evanescent.

Ellen Glasgow

May, Today, Emotion

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Homo religiosus invents religious symbols, which he venerates and worships to save him from facing the finality of his death and dissolution. He devises paradise fictions to provide succor and support... In acts of supreme self-deception, at various times and in various places he has been willing to profess belief in the most incredible myths because of what they have promised him.

Paul Kurtz

Religious, Self, Support

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To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.

David Bentley

Reality, Matter, Reason

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But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

William Carlos Williams

Art, Lying, Writing

William Carlos Williams (1920). “Kora in Hell: Improvisations”

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And so in my mind's eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality - earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.

Rachel Carson

Eye, Reality, Sea

Paul Brooks, Rachel Carson (1972). “The house of life: Rachel Carson at work”

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I am simultaneously and contradictorily both happy and unhappy: 'to succeed' or 'to fail' have for me only ephemeral, contingent meanings (this does not stop my desires and sorrows from being violent ones); what impels me, secretly and obstinately, is not tactical: I accept and I affirm, irrespective of the true and the false, of success and failure; I am withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance.

Roland Barthes

Sorrow, Unhappy, Desire

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A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.

Randall Jarrell

Writing, Successful, People

"Mid-Century American Poets". Book by John Ciardi, "Answers to Questions" (p. 171), 1950.

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And Harry, with the unerring skill of the Seeker, caught the wand in his free hand as Voldemort fell backward, arms splayed, the slit pupils of the scarlet eyes rolling upward. Tom Riddle hit the floor with a mundane finality, his body feeble and shrunken, the white hands empty, the snakelike face vacant and unknowing. Voldemort was dead, killed by his own rebounding curse, and Harry stood with two wands in his hands, staring down at his enemy's shell.

J. K. Rowling

Eye, Hands, Skills

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If time is treated in modern physics as a dimension on a par with the dimensions of space, why should we a priori exclude the possibility that we are pulled as well as pushed along its axis? The future has, after all, as much or as little reality as the past, and there is nothing logically inconceivable in introducing, as a working hypothesis, an element of finality, supplementary to the element of causality, into our equations. It betrays a great lack of imagination to believe that the concept of "purpose" must necessarily be associated with some anthropomorphic deity.

Arthur Koestler

Believe, Reality, Past

"The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe". Book by Arthur Koestler, 1959.

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That which rises and sinks is made up of what it rises from. The finality of the universe is the God Arunachala. Meditating on Him or on the seer, the Self, there is a mental vibration 'I' to which all are reduced. Tracing the source of 'I', the primal 'I-I' alone remains over, and it is inexpressible. The seat of Realisation is within and the seeker cannot find it as an object outside him. That seat is bliss and is the core of all beings. Hence it is called the Heart. The only useful purpose of the present birth is to turn within and realise it. There is nothing else to do.

Ramana Maharshi

Heart, Self, Purpose

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Do not expect to be hailed as a hero when you make your great discovery. More likely you will be a ratbag-maybe failed by your examiners. Your statistics, or your observations, or your literature study, or your something else will be patently deficient. Do not doubt that in our enlightened age the really important advances are and will be rejected more often than acclaimed. Nor should we doubt that in our own professional lifetime we too will repudiate with like pontifical finality the most significant insight ever to reach our desk.

Samuel Warren Carey

Hero, Science, Discovery

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Production for the sake of production - the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies - leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion.

Felix Guattari

Fashion, Growth, World

Félix Guattari (1995). “Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm”, p.21, Indiana University Press

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I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

Daniel Libeskind

Mistake, Believe, Ideas

Daniel Libeskind (1995). “Traces of the Unborn”, University of Michigan College of

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