Prologue Quotes

Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realise that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Prologue
Flying 1

The almond tree knows
before all the other trees

The almond tree knows
that Spring is coming
before all the other trees

The almond tree knows
that Spring is coming
so well
it blossoms
in the winter ~ Alexandra Psaropoulou

Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous. ~ Margaret Fuller

Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks / Plays are like suppers; poets are the cooks / The founder's you; the table is this place / The carvers we; the prologue is the grace / Each act a course, each scene, a different dish. ~ George Farquhar

That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. ~ Flannery O'Connor

A TWIST OF LIGHT-prologue
Reissue date; 6-16-14

The new mother mover the sacking away from the tiny red face, marveling at the perfect mouth and the arc of dark eyebrows of the child she cradled. "Did you ever see anything so pretty?" She spoke to no one in particular, but addressed her question to the group of women huddled inside the hut. Fashioned from cardboard and corrugated iron, the hut wasn't much bigger than the flatbed of the truck that had brought her here.

"Nothing's quite as pretty as a healthy baby." the flat vowels marked the midwife's origins in Oklahoma as surely as her faded sunbonnet and her residence in the labor camp. Set up less than two months ago, it already bulged with over five hundred people who'd been blown out of their homes along with the rich topsoil.(less) ~ Joyce Mandeville

Darwin's Bestiary

PROLOGUE


Animals tame and animals feral
prowled the Dark Ages in search of a moral:
the canine was Loyal, the lion was Virile,
rabbits were Potent and gryphons were Sterile.
Sloth, Envy, Gluttony, Pride - every peril
was fleshed into something phantasmic and rural,
while Courage, Devotion, Thrift - every bright laurel
crowned a creature in some mythological mural.


Scientists think there is something immoral
in singular brutes having meat that is plural:
beasts are mere beasts, just as flowers are floral.
Yet between the lines there's an implicit demurral;
the habit stays with us, albeit it's puerile:
when Darwin saw squirrels, he saw more than Squirrel.



1. THE ANT


The ant, Darwin reminded us,
defies all simple-mindedness:
Take nothing (says the ant) on faith,
and never trust a simple truth.
The PR men of bestiaries
eulogized for centuries
this busy little paragon,
nature's proletarian -
but look here, Darwin said: some ants
make slaves of smaller ants, and end
exploiting in their peonages
the sweating brows of their tiny drudges.


Thus the ant speaks out of both
sides of its mealy little mouth:
its example is extolled
to the workers of the world,
but its habits also preach
the virtues of ~ Philip Appleman

Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated
the same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his "Saviour."... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict?
The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don't wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months' shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don't really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict.
The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict's special need. You don't decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you're an addict. (Junky, Prologue, p. xxxviii) ~ William S. Burroughs

Her arm was outstretched, as though she were reaching for someone she loved, or maybe to ward off some unspoken danger, or maybe even in regret over something she had done. The girl had certainly made enough mistakes in her too-short lifetime. But she couldn't have known that they would all come crashing down around her tonight.
After all, no one goes to a party expecting to die. ~ Katharine McGee

Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you. ~ Andre Aciman

But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements - alimony and acrimony - the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, as if they had not only conjured her but then dismissed her, as if she had been entirely their illusion. He listened to the old songs again, years later on that same dark promenade, when every CD he had ever owned sat nestled in that greatest of all human inventions, the iPod, dialed up and yielding to his fingertip's tap. The songs now offered him, in exchange for all he had lost, the sensation that there was something still to long for, still, something still approaching, and all that had gone before was merely prologue to an unimaginably profound love yet to seize him. If there was any difference now, it was only that his hunger for music had become more urgent, less a daily pleasure than a daily craving. ~ Arthur Phillips

A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft."

PROLOGUE

The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar.

This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats.

First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility.

Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful.

Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama.

Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for.

Cosita would become a Drone! ~ Nick Hahn

My body remembers what part of my mind wants to forget - because there are times when I struggle to reconcile what I gave up to be here, in this very moment, despite how much I wanted it. How much I do want it. The past may be prologue, but it's with me, every day. ~ Samira Ahmed

The past is prologue! ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

What's past is prologue, and the world awaits. ~ Lisa Mantchev

Still less could I be afraid of those ghosts who touch my thoughts in passing. Any library is filled with them. I can take a book from dusty shelves, and be haunted by the thoughts of one long dead, still lively as ever in their winding sheet of words. ~ Diana Gabaldon

The particular human chain we're part of is central to our individual identity. Even if we loathe our families, in order to know ourselves, we seem to need to know about them, just as prologue. Not to know is to live with some of the disorientation and anxiety of the amnesiac. ~ Elizabeth Stone

Hamlet: Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring? Ophelia: 'Tis brief, my lord. Hamlet: As woman's love. ~ William Shakespeare

It's a funny thing about love: you don't need to have it returned to love somebody. Loving's enough.
A Prologue to Love ~ Taylor Caldwell

Chapter Nine Epilogue Photos from the Film PROLOGUE BAM! ~ Tomas Palacios

Most agents hate prologues. Just make the first chapter relevant and well written. ~ Andrea Brown

Unfortunately, unless the job description included a translation of the prologue of The Canterbury Tales, I was dreadfully under-qualified. ~ Rachel Vincent

For some a prologue, for some an epilogue. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

PROLOGUE
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you!
Destiny is certainly something people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries.
If we analyse people's attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why.
In this perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don't do.
At the other extreme we find the I can do it! believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own Destiny.
We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it's because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen! The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures.
Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to write this and for you to be reading it now? There are so m ~ Gonzalo Guma

Some folks have suggested that, using WordPress, Prologue, and RSS, you could create a pretty effective distributed version of Twitter. ~ Matt Mullenweg

Every toy is the prologue to some great amiss. ~ William Shakespeare

I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. ~ Donna Tartt

You can be happy with money and you can be wretched with it. It depends on what kind of person you are.
A Prologue to Love ~ Taylor Caldwell

Prologue: There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich wanting more, that of the sick, wanting something different, and that of the traveler, who says, "anywhere but here." - Ralph Waldo Emerson ~ Mona Simpson

All our life," William James told us in the prologue, "so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits - practical, emotional, and intellectual - systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be."9.29 ~ Charles Duhigg

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach. ~ Mary Roach

[I]n politics, reputation is the prologue to fact... ~ Todd Gitlin

Avoid Prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. ~ Elmore Leonard

As regards authority I so proceed. Boetius says in the second prologue to his Arithmetic, 'If an inquirer lacks the four parts of mathematics, he has very little ability to discover truth.' And again, 'Without this theory no one can have a correct insight into truth.' And he says also, 'I warn the man who spurns these paths of knowledge that he cannot philosophize correctly.' And Again, 'It is clear that whosoever passes these by, has lost the knowledge of all learning.' ~ Roger Bacon

Sit tight, I'm gonna need you to keep time
Come on just snap, snap, snap your fingers for me
Good, good now we're making some progress
Come on just tap, tap, tap your toes to the beat
And I believe this may call for a proper introduction, and well
Don't you see, I'm the narrator, and this is just the prologue?

Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen
Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention
I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives

Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen
Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention
I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives

Applause, applause, no wait wait
Dear studio audience, I've an announcement to make:
It seems the artists these days are not who you think
So we'll pick back up on that on another page

And I believe this may call for a proper introduction, and well
Don't you see, I'm the narrator and this is just the prologue

Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen
Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention
I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives

Swear to shake it up, if you swear to listen
Oh, we're still so young, desperate for attention
I aim to be your eyes, trophy boys, trophy wives

Swear to shake it up, you swear to listen
Swear to shake it up, you swear to listen
Swear to shake it up, you ~ Panic At The Disco

Senior year. And then life. Maybe that's the way it worked. High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you
but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing. Yeah. Wouldn't that be sweet? ~ Benjamin Alire Saenz

God is alpha and omega in the great world: endeavor to make him so in the little world; make him thy evening epilogue and thy morning prologue; practice to make him thy last thought at night when thou sleepest, and thy first thought in the morning when thou awakest; so shall thy fancy be sanctified in the night, and thy understanding rectified in the day; so shall thy rest be peaceful, thy labors prosperous, thy life pious, and thy death glorious. ~ Francis Quarles

And by that destiny, to perform an act Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come In yours and my discharge. ~ Salman Rushdie

Because of this, I feel I am performing a work of love, not of hostility. I do not aim to accuse the contemporary world and monasticism but to enrich the world with the values that monasticism can and should contribute to it. Our world needs monks who are different from itself. Please God, this essay will help them to sing more clearly and beautifully the part they have to sing in the immense symphony of the present time.
To Love Fasting: The Monastic Experience
(prologue) ~ Adalbert De Vogue

We end up populating what we call the intelligentsia with people who are delusional, literally mentally deranged, simply because they never have to pay for the consequences of their actions, repeating moderniest slogans stripped of all depth...The principle of intervention, like that of healers, is first do not harm; even more we will argue, those who don't take risks should never be involved in decision making (p.10).

Their three flaws 1) they think in statics not dynamics 2) they think in low, not high dimensions 3) they think in terms of actions, never interactions....The first flaw is they are incapable in thinking in second steps and unaware of the need of them...The second flaw is that they are also incapable of distinguishing between multidimensional problems and their single dimensional representations. The third flaw is they can't forecast the evolution of those one helps by attaching, or the magnification one gets from feedback. (p.9) ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Last Will

Prologue:
We, Sacco and Vanzetti, sound of body and mind,
Devise and bequeath to all we leave behind,
The worldly wealth we inherited at our birth,
Each one to share alike as we leave this earth.

To Wit:
To babies we will their mothers' love,
To youngsters we will the sun above.
To spooners who wont to tryst the night,
We give the moon and stars that shine so bright.
To thrill them in their hours of joy,
When boy hugs maid and maid hugs boy.
To nature's creatures we allot the spring and summer,
To the doe, the bear, the gold-finch and the hummer.
To the fishes we ascribe the deep blue sea,
The honey we apportion to the bustling bee.
To the pessimist - good cheer - his mind to sooth,
To the chronic liar we donate the solemn truth.

And Lastly:

To those who judge solely seeking renown,
With blaring trumpets of the fakir and clown;
To the prosecutor, persecutor, and other human hounds,
Who'd barter another's honor, recognizing no bounds,
To the Governor, the Jury, who another's life they'd sell -
We endow them with the fiery depths of HELL!

(Industrial Worker, Aug. 20, 1927) ~ Nicola Sacco

Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss. ~ William Shakespeare

PROLOGUE Equinox: Whispers of Destiny
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you.
Destiny is certainly a topic people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries.

If we analyze people's attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme there are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In that perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don't do.

At the other extreme we find the I can do it! Believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own destiny.

We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it's because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen. The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures.

Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to writ ~ Gonzalo Guma

In the story of life, the prologue and epilogue are written by God. Yet the plot has been given to us; therefore we should write the best prose we can. ~ James D. Maxon

PROLOGUE
Some years ago in the Planet Orfheus ...

It was dark when Lucius reached the rendezvous which had been chosen to be the new hideout. The latter had been used for several months and they were concerned that they were being followed and were close to being discovered.
"I thought you were not coming. I've been waiting for you for
almost an hour. I was getting anxious," Sofia said, relieved.
"Sorry, love. It is becoming increasingly difficult. I almost didn't
make it today. The troops were ambushed in the last invasion. Igor and many warriors returned seriously injured," Lucius replied. He looked worried. Why this sudden encounter? They had agreed that the next would be the following week.
Lucius gave her a big hug, pulled her close to him, and remained
silent for a few moments. His longing and desire consumed him. She meant the world to him. Without Sofia, his life would never make sense. He would never forget those eyes, serene and sincere, with a blue so bright and clear that were able to see the soul of the tormented warrior that was he. With her golden hair, Sofia looked like an angel.
"Is there a problem? You're so quiet and deep in thought," she
asked, puzzled.

He answered, "I'm thinking about us. How long are we keeping
it secret?" He walked away from her, sighing. "We can't keep lying and pretending that all is well. You have no idea how much I have to endure when you are away f ~ Gisele De Assis

Prologue When I began writing this story, I thought I had some idea of what it was about. I was wrong. In my life writing I've discovered that there are times when a story, like architecture, is carefully designed, erected, and furnished. Then there are tales that take their own way, and I find myself being dragged along after them like a white-knuckled water skier behind a speedboat. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Honest error may play prologue to wonders. ~ Ari Berk

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both ~ James Madison

The clown knows that life is cruel. The ancient jester's motley coloured costume turned his usually melancholy expression in to a joke. The clown is used to loss. Loss is his prologue. ~ John Berger

every book with the typical prologue, something dramatic like a killer stalking a woman or a dead body, then will leave the reader hanging, go to chapter 1, which of course, has nothing to do with the prologue, then to chapter 2, which of course, has nothing to do with either chapter 1 or the prologue, then after about thirty pages slam the reader back to the action in the prologue, which by then has been forgotten. ~ John Grisham

In the gray world above, I hear myself howling with laughter. Far below me, in the psychic abyss that is part of the Darkness, I hear another howling, one full of joy and pain, rage and celebration.
Not just another witch is coming, my foolish Sisters, but Witch. ~ Anne Bishop

Now hear a new truth. The Great Mother Herself will be forced to hide from those who are coming. She will seem to disappear while they grow strong, but someday She will return. Although our children and their children, perhaps to the thousandth generation, must live in the new world that has forgotten Her, they must never forget. She will return. ~ Barbara Ardinger

How many pages are there in my life?? I've read only a prologue.. But personally it's exciting already. ~ Minzy

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world. ~ Pat Conroy

The Prologue

When the autumn breeze blows and stirs up a sense of adventure, I find myself wishing that I could embark on a grand quest full of danger, a journey to an unknown world. A quest of epic proportions that ends in a glorious blaze of heroics before I return home to resume the life that I had left behind for a time. This is only the wishful musings of a normal girl bored with the way things are. Then again, it might not be.

My story begins much like any other, but don't be deceived! This story is nothing like any other you have ever read - or heard, as the case may be. At least, I don't think it is. But who am I to say such a thing? You must read it and decide for yourself.

So. Here it is. I hope you enjoy the ride - or the read, rather. ~ Annie Riley

First, it's okay to be sad. It's okay to feel things. Remember that. Second, be a kid for as long as you can. Play games, Travis. Be silly" - her eyes glossed over - "and you and your brothers take care of each other, and your father. Even when you grow up and move away, it's important to come home. Okay?"
My head bobbed up and down, desperate to please her.
"One of these days you're going to fall in love, son. Don't settle for just anyone. Choose the girl that doesn't come easy, the one you have to fight for, and then never stop fighting. Never" - she took a deep breath - "stop fighting for what you want. And never" - her eyebrows pulled in - "forget that Mommy loves you. Even if you can't see me." A tear fell down her cheek. "I will always, always love you. ~ Jamie McGuire

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Come forward.
Come in from the summer heat and the flies. Come in from that assault on all senses, that pummelling of rod and cone and drum and cilia. Come in from the great spotlight of the sun, sweeping across the white sands, making everyone, and therefore no one, a star.

Come inside and meet the prologue. ~ Catherynne M Valente

From the black ocean comes the appearance of light and waves. It helps you imagine birth. I want imagination in the photographs I take. It's like a prologue. You wonder, What's going on? You feel something is going to happen. ~ Rinko Kawauchi

PROLOGUE 7TH SEPTEMBER 1874 It's the music that wakes Alison. She opens her eyes and is instantly alert, with only one thought in her mind: They are in the garden again. ~ Danny Weston

All names have been omitted to prevent undeserved infamy... ~ Elle

It was difficult to find my way into 'I Am Abraham,' to feel confident enough to inhabit Lincoln's persona. I began with a prologue in a neutral voice, wrote of Lincoln at the White House with a sly young reporter quizzing him about his humble origins. ~ Jerome Charyn

The past is the prologue. ~ William Shakespeare

A singular confusion exists about the notions of 'culture' and 'civilization'.
Culture began with the 'prologue in heaven.' With its religion, art, ethics, and philosophy, it will always be dealing with man's relation to that heaven from whence he came. Everything within culture means a confirmation or a rejection, a doubt or a reminiscence of the heavenly origin of man. Culture is characterized by this enigma and goes on through all time with the steady striving to solve it.
On the other hand, civilization is a continuation of the zoological, one-dimensional life, the material exchange between man and nature. This aspect of life differs from other animals' lives, but only in its degree, level, and organization. Here, one does not find man embarrassed by evangelical, Hamletian, or Karamasovian problems. The anonymous member of society functions here only by adopting the goods nature and changing the world by his work according to his needs. ~ Alija Izetbegovic

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a
beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start
with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'
unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time
is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been
understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears
that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,
too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into
billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off
in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true
beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is
but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story
sets out. ~ George Eliot

What's past is prologue. ~ William Shakespeare

I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author. ~ Laura Mullen

Thy pride is but the prologue of thy shame; where vain-glory commands, there folly counsels; where pride rides, there shame lackeys. ~ Francis Quarles

Minimalism is not a goal. Reducing the number of possessions that you have is not a goal unto itself. I think minimalism is a method for individuals to find the things that are entirely important to them. It's a prologue for crafting your own unique story. ~ Fumio Sasaki

What is past is prologue. ~ William Shakespeare

She stands on the cliffs, near the old crumbling stone house. There's nothing left in the house but an upturned table, a ladle, and a clay bowl. She stands for more than an hour, goose-bumped and shivering. At these times, she won't confide in me. She runs her hands over her body, as if checking that it's still there, her heart pulsing and beating. The limbs are smooth and strong, thin and sinewy, her hair long and black and messy and gleaming despite her age. You wouldn't know it to look at her, that she's lived long enough to look for what's across the water. Eighty years later, and she is still fifteen. ~ Jodi Lynn Anderson

Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the "other" of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an antagonism to religious texts inherited straight from the Enlightenment, even though they pride themselves on having made the axioms and dogmas of the Enlightenment questionable. But the truth is that contemporary continental philosophy is marked by the language of the call and the response, of the gift, of hospitality to the other, of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, and by the very idea of the "wholly other," a discourse that any with the ears to hear knows has a Scriptural provenance and a Scriptural resonance. ("A Prologue", Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1.1, Fall 2003, p. 1). ~ John D. Caputo

Courtship is to marriage, as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.
(quoted in Life After Life) ~ William Congreve

I did manage to ditch my prologue add quotation marks to my dialogue, take out the big words, and I would have cut some more but there's not enough to cut. ~ John Grisham

A few people have privately voiced fears that on coming back to office I shall go after them. These fears are groundless. There will be no paying off old scores. The past is prologue. ~ Muhammadu Buhari

CONTENTS Endpaper Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Acknowledgments Prologue: To Question Part One: Alight 1. Santhid 2. Bridge Four ~ Brandon Sanderson

Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am ~ Fernando Pessoa

were Huguenots who abhorred the Church to which it belonged. That huge donjon, built by the Counts of Poitiers, was still a place of formidable strength; but Richelieu would soon be in power and the days of local autonomy and provincial fortresses were numbered. All unknowing the parson was riding into the last act of a sectarian war, into the prologue to a nationalist revolution. At ~ Aldous Huxley

Why are instants of reunion so empty? Perhaps because they are so anticipated, too muffled already at the moment of their coming with every previous imagining to make any mark of their own.They refer backwards, to all the length of time that has refined itself as the prologue to cataclysm, and to all the flawed imaginings themselves, in each of which this moment is strangely dilated, expansive, arrested ~ Susan Choi

One admirable thing about my grandparents was their ability to forgive infinitely. ~ Eleanor Lanahan