For some of you 2015 has been an exceptional year and you may be very sad for it to be at the end. Others may be relieved to move on in hopes that 2016 will be more favorable. Whichever way you feel, you'll likely find value in respecting the ending as much as you anticipate the new beginning.
Endings are powerful. Get the ending wrong, and your growth could be stunted by lingering baggage that saps your energy and attention. A properly executed ending however, provides closure and cleanliness, readying you to attack the new with refreshed vigor. Here to help you get the proper perspective are insights on endings from the smart, the successful, and the poetic.
1. "It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn't matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over."
- Paulo Coelho
2. "There is no real ending. It's just the place where you stop the story."
3. "A man is like a novel: until the very last page you don't know how it will end. Otherwise it wouldn't be worth reading."
4. "Ends are not bad things, they just mean that something else is about to begin. And there are many things that don't really end, anyway, they just begin again in a new way. Ends are not bad and many ends aren't really an ending; some things are never-ending."
-C. JoyBell C.
5. "I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose."
-John Green, Let It Snow
6. "There's a trick to the 'graceful exit.' It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over--and let it go. It means leaving what's over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out."
7. "He nods, as if to acknowledge that endings are almost always a little sad, even when there is something to look forward to on the other side."
-Emily Giffin,Love the One You're With
8. "The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable."
9. "Build your life on your dreams; because dreams never have bad endings."
10. "The greatest challenges humans face throw-out their lives are two:
1- the challenge of where to start
2- the challenge of when to stop."
11. "Our story may have any number of endings but its start is a singular choice we make today."
12. "Endings are thus formally unappealing to me, more than beginning or ending, in life, I enjoy continuing. Continuing is my only focus or concern."
13. "We lose the precious sense that an end is only a beginning in disguise."
-Craig D. Lounsbrough
14. "Every ending is a beginning. We just don't know it at the time."
15. "Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning."
-Robin Hobb,Fool's Errand
16. "The best endings resonate because they echo a word, phrase, or image from earlier in the story, and the reader is prompted to think back to that reference and speculate on a deeper meaning."
17. "An end is only a beginning in disguise."
-Craig D. Lounsbrough,An Intimate Collision: Encounters with Life and Jesus
18. "A sunset is nothing more and nothing less than the backside of a sunrise."
-Craig D. Lounsbrough
19. "It all begins and ends in your mind. What you give power to has power over you."
20. "Do not wait until the near end of your life to realize that you have not fully lived to love."
-Lailah Gifty Akita,
21. "The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other."
-Craig D. Lounsbrough,
22. "I try to avoid stories that end with...and he was never seen again."
23. "And above all else, remember that the end of a movie (or a TV show, or a play, or a book) is never really the end."
-Jen Calonita,On Location
24. "There should have been a better farewell. But in the end, there never is. And we take what meagre scraps we can find."
-Richard K. Morgan
25. "There is always more after the ending. Always the next morning, and the next. Always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one true ending that none of us can escape. But even that ending is only a small one, larges as it looms for us. There is still the next morning for everyone else. For the vast majority of the rest of the universe that ending might as well not ever have happened. Every ending is an arbitrary one. Everything ending is from another angle, not really an ending."
-Ann Leckie,Ancillary Mercy
26. "A moment's beginning ends in a moment"
27. "The great miraculous bell of translucent ice is suspended in mid-air. It rings to announce endings and beginnings. And it rings because there is fresh promise and wonder in the skies."
- Vera Nazarian,The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
28. "Endings to be useful must be inconclusive."
-Samuel R. Delany
29. "It's a lot easier to say when something ended rather than when it began. Most of us can recognize the end from a mile away, but the beginning always slips up on us, lulling us into thinking what we're living through is yet another moment, in yet another day."
-Steve Yarbrough,Safe from the Neighbors
30. "The most important thing is this: to sacrifice what you are now for what you can become tomorrow."
-Shannon L. Alder
31. "The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point."
32. "What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year."
33. "I may regret the way we ended, but I will never regret what we had."
34. "It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody."
35. "Everything has to come to an end, sometime."
-L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz