END-OF-THE-WORLD QUOTES & THOUGHTS

Apparently --  

“Due to the lack of experienced trumpeters, the end of the world has been postponed.”

A funny thing happened
at the May 21, 2011
post-end-of-the-world party 

But that’s no surprise to many.  

Claude Levi-Strauss observed, “The world began without man, and it will end without him.”

Henry Miller suggested, “The world dies over and over again, but the skeleton always gets up and walks.”

“An ill beginning hath an ill ending,” we learn from a proverb collected by John Clarke in 1639.

But on the other side of the optimist/pessimist equation, proverb collector and compiler James Howell recorded, in 1659 …

“A good beginning hath a good ending.”

And also:

“A hard beginning hath a good ending.”

Not to be outdone, John Ray, also an English collector of proverbs, noted, in 1678 –

“Good to begin well, better to end well.”

And then there’s a German saying (my people, paternal side):

“A bad beginning may make a good ending.”

“In my beginning is my end,” said T S Eliot.

And, of course he also said --

“This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Not wanting to end this with a whimper: There’s the always quotable Winston Churchill who said, about the British victory at El Alamein in 1942--

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” 

… an idea he, perhaps, purloined from Talleyrand who, in 1813 after the Battle of Leipzig, remarked to Napoleon:

“It is the beginning of the end.”

How to end this? I guess I’ll close by quoting the eclectic Frank Zappa:

“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice -- there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”