One thing was certain. These imagined stories never ended as stories in books did, with telling declarations of arrival: ‘- and then she realized – ’ or ‘It came to him suddenly that – ’ Instead they ended somewhere on their own descending curvatures, simply run out of fuel or deprived of interest, or, as frequently happened, interrupted by the exigencies of real life and the return to the true and ongoing story that pressed as tightly as clothing against the skin. The street, the hardness of the pavement, the snow turning blue in the fading light.
Carol Shields A Fairly Conventional Woman
Marriages and deaths, noble sacrifices and miraculous restorations, tragic separation and unhoped-for reunions, great falls and dreams / fulfilled; these, in my view, constitute an ending worth the wait.
Diane Setterfield The Thirteenth Tale
The end is so much the most difficult. I thought the beginning would be harder than the ending, but it isn’t so.
Margaret Laurence, A Letter to Adele Wiseman, 20 June 1955