#innings

Just as abruptly, he'd become a father. While preparing the book for publication, he'd been dating a woman named Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist at MGH. They were evenly matched in many ways: sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued, and devoted to their careers and personal freedoms to the exclusion of any serious interest in so-called romance. They spent ten months together. A few weeks after they broke up -- Sarah initiated the split -- she called to say that she was pregnant. "It's mine?" asked Affenlight. "He or she," replied Sarah, "is mostly mine." They named the child Pella -- that was Affenlight's idea, though Sarah certainly had the final say. For those first couple of years, Affenlight conspired as often as he could to show up at Sarah and Pella's Kendall Square townhouse with expensive takeout and a new toy. He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her, a beautiful something where before there'd been nothing. He hated kissing her good-bye; and yet he relished, couldn't keep himself from relishing, the total quiet of his townhouse when he walked in, the scattered books and papers and lack of baby-proofing. ↗

— Chad Harbach

#so-called-romance #art

Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet? ↗

— L.M. Montgomery

#fresh-start #inspirational #mistake #mistakes #new-day

One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man. ↗

— George Eliot

#new-beginnings #life

Rather than turning the page, it's much easier to just throw the book away. ↗

— Anthony Liccione

#new-life #life

Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know. ↗

— Pema Chödrön

#healing #new-beginnings #spirituality #unknown #life

You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#love #love

Most things, even the greatest moments on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremor, a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration. ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#delirium #lauren-oliver #small #music

Hope drowned in shadows emerges fiercely splendid–– boldly angelic. ↗

— Aberjhani

#angels #courage #faith #haiku #haikus

Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#spring

Catherine Land liked the beginnings of things. The pure white possibility of the empty room, the first kiss, the first swipe at larceny. And endings, she liked endings, too. The drama of the smashing glass, the dead bird, the tearful goodbye, the last awful word which could never be unsaid or unremembered. It was the middles that gave her pause. This, for all its forward momentum, this was a middle. The beginnings were sweet, the endings usually bitter, but the middles were only the tightrope you walked between the one and the other. No more than that. ↗

— Robert Goolrick

#endings #middle #drama