Denouement Quotes

• So I think there is one rule every host and hostess ought to keep with the comb and nail file and bicarbonate and aromatic spirits on a handy shelf,
  Which is don't spoil the denouement by telling the guests everything is terrible, but let them have the thrill of finding it out for themselves.

  Ogden Nash

  Thinking, Guests, Nails

  Ogden Nash (1941). “The face is familiar: the selected verse of Ogden Nash”, Garden City publishing company, inc

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• It might be useful to be able to predict war. But tension does not necessarily lead to war, but often to peace and to denouement.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  War, Doe, Might

  "The new sage of Wall Street" by Edward Helmore, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2008.

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• Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.

  Grant Morrison

  Real, Plot, Ends

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• [E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Air, Views, Names

  Edgar Allan Poe (2016). “Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works”, p.243, My Ebook Publishing House

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• Anticlimax is, of course, the warp and way of things. Real life seldom structures a decent denouement.

  Dan Simmons

  Life, Real, Way

  Dan Simmons (2014). “The Hyperion Cantos 4-Book Bundle: Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion”, p.286, Spectra

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• A major boom in real stock prices in the US after Black Tuesday brought them halfway back to 1929 levels by 1930. This was followed by a second crash, another boom from 1932 to 1937, and a third crash. Speculative bubbles do not end like a short story, novel, or play. There is no final denouement that brings all the strands of a narrative into an impressive final conclusion. In the real world, we never know when the story is over.

  Robert J. Shiller

  Real, Play, Tuesday

  "Speculative bubbles don't just pop - they may deflate and reflate" by Robert J. Shiller, www.theguardian.com. July 19, 2013.

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• One dictionary defines denouement as "a final part in which everything is made clear and no questions or surprises remain." By that definition, it is exactly the wrong word to describe this chapter. This chapter will make nothing clear; it will raise many questions; and it may even contain a surprise or two. But I say we call it the denouement anyway because the words sounds so sophisticated and French.

  Pseudonymous Bosch

  Two, Finals, May

  Pseudonymous Bosch (2011). “The Name of this Book is Secret: The Secret Series”, p.193, Usborne Publishing Ltd

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• The human drama is reaching its denouement. The great unveiling is approaching, a time when the power structures of the world begin to crumble and people of the heart sing out a new truth. Many voices are joining the chorus, many feet are walking the path, many minds are dreaming possibilities for a magnificent future. For beneath the crises that are looming at every level of civilization, the global heart is awakening, beating out the rhythm of a new and glorious dance, calling us to a better way of living.

  Anodea Judith

  Life, Dream, Drama

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• After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.

  Jules de Goncourt

  Drama, Reading, Passion

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• Do not permit yourself to fall in love with the end-game play to the exclusion of entire games. It is well to have the whole story of how it happened; the complete play, not the denouement only. Do not embrace the rag-time and vaudeville of chess.

  Emanuel Lasker

  Falling In Love, Games, Play

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• I think the success of 'Downton' is partly because there are effectively 18 leading characters, all given equal importance, so it's enormously involving on many levels. But also, it's a new story. It's not like Dickens or Austen, where everyone knows the denouement.

  Michelle Dockery

  Character, Thinking, Stories

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest...

  James Branch Cabell

  Race, Order, Romance

  "The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions". Book by James Branch Cabell, 1917.

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• Sometimes I feel that I am destined always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs. That God has made me the victim of some cosmic practical joke, by assigning me little more than a walk-on part in my own life. Or sometimes I feel that my role is simply to be a spectator to other people's stories, and always to wander away at the most important moment, drifiting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds.

  Jonathan Coe

  People, Kitchen, Tea

  Jonathan Coe (2001). “The rotters' club”

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• A young professor I watched in action at one of our large eastern colleges used to stand with his back to the class and mumble explanations of blackboard problems. He was "let out" at the end of two years because students refused to attend his classes. He was given an evasive reason for his dismissal and he left with justifiable bitterness toward the administration. If someone had told him the truth he could have avoided this denouement. Sometimes professors go on for years without any conception of remediable faults which irritate their listeners.

  Mary Barnett Gilson

  College, Class, Two

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• There's a conventional reaction when you see a star: You anticipate he'll be a part of a particular denouement down the road, so you don't worry for that character.

  Kathryn Bigelow

  Stars, Character, Worry

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