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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 don't mess around with the men in the coven, especially my Shadowblades," she said with quiet finality. Flirting was one thing but anything more, it was a mistake of epic proportions. His eyes narrowed and he gave a slow shake of his head. "That is all right then. Because I want so much more than just to mess around.

  Diana Pharaoh Francis

  Mistake, Eye, Epic

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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 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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• I am so lonely without you, Aedan," Jane said simply. "You truly want me?" "More than anything. I'm only half without you." "Then you are my woman." His words were finality, a bond he would not permit broken. She had given herself to his keeping. He would never let her go. "And you'll never leave me?" she pressed. "I'll stay with you for all of ever, lass." Jane's eyes flared, and she looked at him strangely. "And then yet another day?" she asked breathlessly. "Oh, aye.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Lonely, Eye, Simply You

  Karen Marie Moning (2012). “Into the Dreaming (with bonus material)”, p.87, Delacorte Press

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• Science is not a system of certain, or -established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality... And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover-discover. Like Bacon, we might describe our own contemporary science-'the method of reasoning which men now ordinarily apply to nature'-as consisting of 'anticipations, rash and premature' and as 'prejudices'.

  Karl Popper

  Nature, Science, Men

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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