"The good ending dismisses us with a..." - Quote by John Updike

The good ending dismisses us with a touch of ceremony and throws a backward light of significance over the story just read. It makes it, as they say, or unmakes it. A weak beginning is forgettable, but the end of a story bulks in the reader's mind like the giant foot in a foreshortened photograph.
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More by John Updike

“For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.”
— John Updike
“Life is a nacho. It can be yummy-crunchy or squishy-yucky. It just depends on how long it takes for you to start eating it.”
— John Updike
“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.”
— John Updike

More on Storytelling

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
— Albert Camus
“But stories that live longestAre sung above the glass,And Parnell loved his countryAnd Parnell loved his lass.”
— William Butler Yeats
“What I try to do with any of my stories, any of my novels, is make them feel very original.”
— Nicholas Sparks

More on Writing

“One of the advantages of being dead, I guess, is that somebody else can edit all this.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
“It is difficult to believe that even idiots ever succumbed to such transparent contradictions, to such gaudy processions of mere counter-words, to so vast and obvious a nonsensicalitysentence after sentence that has no apparent meaning at all--stuff quite as bad as the worst bosh of Warren Gamaliel Harding.”
— H. L. Mencken
“A letter does not blush.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero