Finish

“ Am I pleading, then, for mere technique? No. As long as there are any signs of technique at all, the picture is unfinished. What is finish? A picture is finished when all traces of work, and of the means employed to bring about the result, have disappeared. ”

“ Superior natives, kindly missionaries and District Officers were my tutors.
I must be fair to the reader and show him a few of the simpler twists in the language, and interpret a few peculiarities. Otherwise, the forthcoming sample of what became my standard pidgin hookworm lecture might be difficult to understand.
The verb “go,” for instance. The future is “by-and-by me go,” and the past is “me go finish.” “Finish” is trickily used to express finality. When a boy is “dead finish” he is dead. When you bury a body you “plant ’im finish.” ”

“ IV. Lastly, here is a striking contrast to the fate which attends all human workers.
There are very few of us who even partially seem to be happy enough to begin and finish any task, beyond the small ones of our daily life. Authors die, with books half finished, with sentences half finished sometimes, where the pen has been laid down. ”

“ Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything. ”

“ Finishing is what you have to do, he thought. If you don't finish, nothing is worth a damn. ”

“ So my feet have been in almost continual training. I have never found a task too hard to undertake nor too tedious to finish, and no one appreciates the truth of the old saying, 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' better than I do. ”

“ But the reader who follows to their close the chapters we have here more especially been considering—and who can put them down unfinished?—will find that their brilliancy of light and color are thrown up against a very dark background, and that the shadows gather and deepen about us as the story runs its course. ”

“ Intelligent finishing consists in correcting small faults of detail, in revising the relative values of the shades and half-tones, in giving definite form to the fingers and toes, or any portion of the figure which may have been neglected. ”

“ What was once undertaken had to be finished, even if the inconvenience, tedium, vexation, nay, uselessness, of the thing begun were plainly manifested in the mean time. It seemed as if he regarded completeness as the only end, and perseverance as the only virtue. ”

“ when it is finished, what a relief! ”

“ It is never quite safe to think we have done with life. When we imagine we have finished our story fate has a trick of turning the page and showing us yet another chapter. ”

“ When you have finished with the others, that is my time. ”

“ Next apply a coat of filler colored to match the stain. Directions for its application will be found upon the cans in which the filler comes. After the filler has hardened put on a very thin coat of shellac. [26]
What step is taken next will depend upon what kind of a surface is desired. Several coats of polishing wax may be put on. This is easily done—directions will be found on the cans—and makes the most satisfactory finish for mission and craftsman furniture. It is the easiest to apply. Several coats of shellac or of varnish might be put on instead of wax. ”

“ I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one’s finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. ”

“ Enter Quince for the Prologue.
Prologue.
If we offend, it is with our good will.
That you should think, we come not to offend,
But with good will. To show our simple skill,
That is the true beginning of our end. ”

“ The end of a short story comprises the climax and the conclusion. The climax is the chief surprise, the relief of the suspense, or the greatest relief, if there is more than one; it is the apex of interest and emotion; it is the point of the story; it is really the story. The conclusion is the solving of all problems, the termination of the narrative itself, and the artistic severing of all relations between narrator and reader. ”

“ THE END OF THINGS
The aim of the heavens, the end of the earth—
What a measureless sweep, what a mighty girth,
From the far off first to the end of all things!
The end of the rose, which fades in a day,
The purpose of the plant an age on the way—
I dream of Beauty in the end of things.
The end of all men, and the end of myself,
From the artist great to the smallest elf,
Our thoughts and our deeds in the end of things.
The fate of the infants who die without ken,
Of their growth and knowledge, God’s super-men—
What developments vast in the end of things! ”

“ For from our point of view, the Other, the completion that our finite being seeks, is not merely something beyond the present, and is not merely a future experience, but is also inclusive of the very process of the striving itself. For the goal of every finite life is simply the totality whereof this life, in its finitude, is a fragment. When I seek my own goal, I am looking for the whole of myself. ”

“ The longest continued story in the most thrilling of the cheap weeklies reaches, as we are given to understand, a conclusion at some time. Imagine an infinite continued story, with the poor lovers eternally weeping and quarreling, and you will see what an infinite historical process in the world would mean. ”

“ We know that all things come to an end. What destiny awaits the book to which our evening thoughts have been given? That is a path not open to our tread. The cloudy curtain screens the threshold of it. Still we may listen and imagine that we hear sounds. ”

“ The end comes as came the beginning, And shadows fail into the past; And the goal, is it not worth the winning, If it brings us but home at the last? While over the pain of waste places We tread, ‘tis a blossoming rod That drives us to grace from disgraces, From the plains to the Gardens of God. ”

“ In fiction you settle upon the final chapter before you begin the first, and every event is described and placed in the fabric of the story to suit an end already in view. A story of real life, like real life itself, has no beginning, no end. ”

“ Why, work was the beginning and the end of everything. Reaching back to the beginnings of creation, extending clear until the last soul in heaven had passed on and through the training camp of the last hereafter, it was the thing that counted most. ”

“ The future is in our hands now,—pliant and impressible as wax, and we are moulding it into form day by day. Will that form shed a cheering beam on our path, or will it cast around us a web of despondency? ”

“ With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation,—as life sprang out of death, and death out of life,—must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker,—scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! ”

“ Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas. And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort. If you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story. ”

“ Then begins a journey in ten stages, which is a vivid picture of the difficulties and triumphs of the Christian life. Every trial, every difficulty, every experience of joy or sorrow, of peace or temptation, is put into the form and discourse of a living character. ”

“ We feel it as a sense of background, a conviction that a given poem is not the record, but the culmination of an experience, and that the experience of which it is the culmination is far larger and more profound than the one which it seems to record. ”

“ De L'Ester—So you will, and though we may not hasten the passing years, we all may improve each moment of that which possesses neither beginning or ending. Oh, yes, many persons are given to flippant mention of eternity and perfection. ”

“ Loosed from their seventy years' adhesion, pass
Each to some joy of changed experience,
Weight in the earth or glory in the grass.
It may be, that we cease; we cannot tell.
Even if we cease, life is a miracle. ”

“ Your story must have an end. A successful ending is quite as important as the climax, and needs careful consideration. It must be brief and appropriate, and leave the mind at rest, without any questioning or dissatisfaction. It may be well for the beginner at first to analyze his stories in this way, into these four parts, either in his thoughts or on paper, for it will give excellent practice and make the retention of the story by the memory a simple matter. ”

“ The knowledge that it could by three stages, laborious but unchanging and certain in their operation, reach a life of its own, the same in its whole effect, and yet in each detail so different to the original, radiated joy through the whole slow process. ”

“ Again, when your own necessary activity comes into the foreground, your small energetic love perpetually pressing to deeper and deeper realisation--"tasting through and through, and seeking through and through, the fathomless ground" of the Infinite and Eternal--it seems rather a perpetually renewed encounter than a final achievement. ”

“ Scarcely a day, or an hour of the day, when there is not being produced, scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon an inexhaustible source of constant and perfect beauty. ”

“ It may trail off into gray endlessness. But Beauty must be complete—whether it be a field of poppies or a great life,—it must end, and the End is part and triumph of the Beauty. I know there are those who envisage a beauty eternal. ”

“ The beginning foresees the end, the end remembers the beginning, and the thought and image are evolved together in an even, continuous flow. The thing is indeed perfect in its way, still it is not in Shakespeare's latest and highest style. ”

“ Every word of the uttered line of poetry, viewed in its reference to the other words, or to previous and later experiences, is present in its own place in the series, is over and done with before later events can come, or when they are present, and is not yet when the former events of the succession are present. ”

“ The commencement of a thing is immediately connected, in idea if not in time, with its end. “Lightly come, lightly go.” The will has called it into existence—the will calls it back again into nothing. ”

“ Not till the story is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or the roll of a gathered wave. ”

“ At certain stages in our great journey we sit down and take a retrospect, going over, hand in hand with memory, the old road and carefully treading in the same footsteps, looking upon the same scenes, suffering the old pains and rejoicing in the same joys. ”

“ For him it is not, as in the story itself, the last and crowning act of a series of developments, but the first and unique act, the creation of life itself in its supreme form, off-hand and immediately, in the cold and lifeless stone. ”

“ Then, our will guiding our eye, the mind translates to us physically the statue’s expansion and contraction, the withheld completion of absolute balance, the approximation to equilibrium: and it is only after we have passed through discords and struggles and complicated developments—in other words, after we have268 striven for physical completion—that the finality comes as a satisfying consummation, like the knowledge of a tremendous task, long laboured over, brought to perfect and final accomplishment. ”

“ Ends advance in a series, one after the other, and in their progress the last end becomes first, 387. Ends make progression in nature through times without time, but they cannot come forth and manifest themselves, until the effect or use exists and becomes a subject, 401. ”

“ But the pleasure he derives from the sense of completeness, the sense that a walk or a story has a beginning and a middle and an end, the real plot pleasure, is negligible compared with the pleasure he gets in the action itself. ”

“ The attainment of one end is but the beginning of a new pursuit; and the discovery of one art is but a prolongation of the thread by which we are conducted to further inquiries, and while we hope to escape from the labyrinth, are led to its most intricate paths. ”

“ The task of preparation for his end be thine. (Exeunt the court.)
Doughty. Here my life must end, where I thought it had but well begun! Ambition’s bright mirage with hope deceitful lured. Its distant plains glowed in the sunshine of a feigned success. Success!—by what instruments? ”