The end is simply the beginning of an even longer story.
Interpretation
Life is a continuous journey where every end leads to a new beginning.
This quote by Zadie Smith reflects the cyclical nature of life, suggesting that every conclusion we encounter paves the way for new opportunities and experiences. Instead of viewing endings as definitive, we should embrace them as transitions that lead to further growth and development, indicating that our stories are constantly evolving.
In practice
In a graduation speech, one might say, 'Remember, the end of your studies is simply the beginning of a larger story ahead.'
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
When you're 40, you can't ride the fence anymore. You gotta make definite decisions about your life.
Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
I think about death all the time. I think that's a good thing because we're all going to die, and the only thing we can control is how we are and what we're doing in the meantime.
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