Narrative Ending Quotes

And in stories, endings matter.

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

Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.

For a moment, I panic. It's that feeling of falling when you know without question, that you've lost control of your car, or made a mistake that's beyond repair. 'What do I do now?' I ask desperately. 'Tell me! What do I do now?' He remains calm. He looks at me closely and says, 'Keep living, Ed... It's only the pages that stop here.

You don't have to resolve every problem of the book at the end, but you do have to resolve some.

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.

We all hate those stories that end with 'And that's the story.'