beginnings

Puss hopped down from the couch and rummaged in Mark__ closet until he found a black leather belt. This he looped along his shoulder, around his waist, and then clasped together. ____ off to make war, so that you may have love.

Once a cat loves you, it loves you till the end.

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street.

Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main,Sailors and their sweethearts all agree.Neon signs of red and greenShine upon the friendly scene,Welcoming you in from off the sea.Santa's bag is filled with all your dreams come true:Nickel beers that sparkle like champagne,Barmaids who all love to screw,All of them reminding youIt's Christmas Eve on old East Main.

It was Christmas Day and Danny the Car Wiper hit the street junksick and broke after seventy-two hours in the precinct jail. It was a clear bright day, but there was warmth in the sun. Danny shivered with an inner cold. He turned up the collar of his worn, greasy black overcoat. This beat benny wouldn't pawn for a deuce, he thought.

And when the end comes, we shall see the end. We shall see and understand how we started better. We shall see those who started well and those who ended well. When the end comes, we shall surely see the end!

I have always been considered a bit of an outsider, and a general failure at everything I put my hand towards. In fact, you might even go so far as to say that I__ a lesser being of great insignificance! I state this because, when writing a story, you should always start the first line off with at least one basic truth.-First lines from the novel Sukiyaki

The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won't shock the system with its arrival.

And the day inevitably comes when the scrapbook of summer, smeared with ice cream slurps and sweat stains, gives way to that new clean white notebook, spine unbroken, begging to be smudged with the enthusiasm of a number two pencil and a mind open to the possibilities.

But now that so much is changing, isn't it time for us to change? Couldn't we try to gradually develop and slowly take upon ourselves, little by little, our part in the great task of love? We have been spared all its trouble, and that is why it has slipped in among our distractions, as a piece of real lace will sometimes fall into a child's toy-box and please him and no longer please him, and finally it lies there among the broken and dismembered toys, more wretched than any of them. We have been spoiled by superficial pleasures like dilettantes, and are looked upon as masters. But what if we despised our successes? What if we started from the very outset to learn the task of love, which has always been done for us? What if we went ahead and became beginners, now that much is changing?

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

The world is round, and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.

Despite my pain, I felt not the regret of an ending, but the foreboding of a beginning.

How we begin and how we end any relationship is a product of planning, fortuity, and personality. Many enterprises commenced in good faith spiral into confusion, discord, and disarray, generate turmoil and corruption, sunburn the sensitive parties, and conclude in a cesspool of regret and animosity.

It's possible to find order in chaos, and it's equally possible to find chaos underlying apparent order. Order and chaos are slippery concepts. They're like a set of twins who like to swap clothing from time to time. Order and chaos frequently intermingle and overlap, the same as beginnings and endings. Things are often more complicated, or more simple, than they seem. Often it depends on your angle. I think that telling a story is a way of trying to make life's complexity more comprehensible. It's a way of trying to separate order from chaos, patterns from pandemonium.

They kiss.The kiss that will change everything. Elliot will never have been happier than with this girl, funny, down to earth and bohemian, who dreamed of remaking the world as she ate her pizza.And Ilena will never have felt more beautiful than through the gaze of this mysterious and appealing boy that fate had thrown in her path in such a strange way.

For one, dazzling, infinite moment, August felt like he was standing on a precipice, the end of one world and the beginning of another, a whisper and a bang.

The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged.