Endgame Quotes

You have to pretend you get an endgame. You have to carry on like you will; otherwise, you can't carry on at all.

The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent.

Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?...We see a game beyond the endgame...As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

We’re endgame.” I wipe a stray tear from the corner of my eye. “What does that mean?” “It means that we’ll wind up together eventually. It might take a year for us to sort everything out, or two, or ten. Whatever. But it’ll happen.

When I brought my eyes back to his, I knew without a doubt that if we were anywhere else—alone—he would kiss me. He swallowed, and my eyes tracked down to his throat before slowly climbing back up by way of his strong chin, nose, and dark-as-night brown eyes. He raised one eyebrow, an unspoken question, and I realized at that moment that I wanted it. I wanted Wes. Michael had been my endgame, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that anymore. I wouldn’t run through a train station for Michael. But I would do it for Wes. Holy shit.

Perception s the only reality that matters

But she also considered that it ran deeper than that: in order to change the way people think, you have to change how they perceive.

Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don't, people with guns come and force us to pay. That's violent.

Sandy knew her plan was shit. But sometimes better ideas grew out of bad ones. Shit makes good fertilizer, her Gramps used to say, and a wrong track can lead to a new perspective, and a better path.

Happiness is such a fragile thing, isn't it? So easily burst, like a bubble blown by a child, and always on the verge of being carried away.

I know what it is to want something that could destroy you.

Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that!

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that… Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more.

In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.

HAMM: We're not beginning to... to... mean something? CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

Old endgame lost of old, play and lose and have done with losing.

To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.

Everyone needs to escape sometimes, and retreating into somebody else's fantasy isn't nearly as satisfying as slipping into your own.

(You have to pretend that you get an endgame. You have to carry on like you will; otherwise, you can't carry on at all.)

Nix and Lothaire: When the collar dropped to the ground, Lothaire rolled his head on his neck. But instead of disappearing immediately, he traced to stand mere feet from Nïx. A towering vampire with skin like marble and chillingly flawless features was staring down a petite Valkyrie with crazed eyes and a cryptic smile. The tension between the two was palpable. Even on the verge of flipping the fuck out, Regin couldn’t look away. “The Accession grinds on, does it not?” Lothaire said. “Just like old times.” Nïx winked. “Alas, Dorada will come for you once she rises again.” “I’ll be ready.” He narrowed his red eyes. “You’ve likely foreseen this moment. Tell me, are we to fight now? As in the past?” “You defy foresight, Lothaire.” “That’s only fair, Phenïx, since you’ve long defied insight.” Phenïx? Nïx canted her head. “What does your Endgame tell you?” “That white queen will never take black king.” He gave her a formal bow. “Until our next match.” “There won’t be a next match, vampire.” His brow creased into a frown, the Enemy of Old disappeared.

It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

Why are we doing this?" Caine asked him. "You know damned well why we're doing this. Because it's a fight. It may be THE fight. I may be the final fight. And what else are we good at, you and me? What are we going to do if we ever get out there anyway?

Do you believe in the life to come? Mine was always that.

Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.

You know the end to this. Don't you? How could you be here listening to this tale if you didn't? But sometimes it is the how of a thing, not just the endgame, that matters most.

To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?

God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it's indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!' 'But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look at the world and look at my TROUSERS!

Love does not imply pacifism.

Hate me if you must, but know that I will never hate you.

Clov: If I don't kill the rat, he'll die. Hamm: That's right.

So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law-made by those in power, to serve those in power-so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

My anger subsides, I'd like to pee.

HAMM: Scoundrel! Why did you engender me? NAGG: I didn't know. HAMM: What? What didn't you know? NAGG: That it'd be you. (Pause.)

In case you haven’t realized it yet, you are endgame for me, Elodie Stillwater. And everyone else in the entire world can go and eat a dick.

Enemies are a given. Friends are not.

Live bravely in the time you have and smile at the void.

We were settled. We were sorted. We were endgame. (If I get an endgame.) (You have to pretend that you get an endgame. You have to carry on like you will; otherwise, you can't carry on at all.)

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception.

There's something dripping in my head. A heart, a heart in my head.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.

Remember: the greatest danger you face in the world today is that you are replaceable. As you get older, people who are younger, cheaper and more in tune with trends are rising up and threatening your position. Your only salvation is to mine your uniqueness, to combine various skills that set you apart. No one can do what you do. That is your endgame.

That's life. Life is the ultimate game, and its rules were made to be broken

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Part of the journey is the end.

You have to pretend you get an endgame. You have to carry on like you will. Otherwise you can't carry on at all.

CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come? HAMM: Mine was always that.

It is midnight. Rain is beating against the window." It was not midnight. It was not raining.

Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished. Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there's a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap. I can't be punished any more. I'll go now to my kitchen, ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, and wait for him to whistle me. Nice dimensions, nice proportions, I'll lean on the table, and look at the wall, and wait for him to whistle me.

Everyone fails at who they are supposed to be. The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are. It's time for me to be who I am rather than who I'm supposed to be.

When mothers warn their daughters about all the cold nasty men out there who will only break their tender little hearts, I'm the one they've got in mind because I'm the one who broke their hearts when their mothers were warning them.

This is not a love story. It is my life, and as such, there is love, loss, war, death, and sacrifice. It's about things that needed to be done and choices made. I regret nothing.

Crazy people always think they're perfectly sane. It's what makes them so crazy; their entire delusion lies within the fact that they believe they aren't deluded.

You have to pretend that you have an endgame. You have to carry on like you will; otherwise, you can't carry on at all.

I always thought we would be the endgame, even when I knew I couldn’t afford to be that person.

It's a rare thing not to have been bonny-- once.

The future is unwritten. What will be will be.

a real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves

I spent so much of my time being loyal to you, even when we weren’t dating, because I thought we had our endgame plan.

I take it Asher called you?” “What’s your endgame here, Henry? Why are you going?

As he explained to his officers and men, the war against Persia could not be finished until the shah, as the Persians called their king, was mat, or finished. The endgame had to be shah mat, a Persian phrase that would evolve in time into checkmate.

One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You've been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog shit hotdogs, dog shit ice cream, General Tso's dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn't taste good. Or if you cling too tightly to these stories (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make this example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac, Whopper, or Coca Cola.

I hope you nail the bastard.” So does he.

The hardest part isn’t dying; it’s surviving.

Beckett despite his professed preference for Racine, is master and victim, and as such pervades Beckett’s canonical drama, Endgame. Beckett’s Hamlet follows the French model, in which excessive consciousness negates action, which is at some distance from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Vel once told me that the heart isn't like a cup of water. You can't drain it. It's more like an endless well, and the more you love, the more it pumps out.

That's right. Endgame. The FAYZ barrier is coming down; at least that's my bet. But there's also a ninety percent chance you and me both end up dead. Ten percent chance we both actually get out alive. In which case we end up sharing a cell somewhere." He laughed. "Kind of unfair, really, what with me being evil and all, and you just so darned virtuous and heroic.

What criticism offers you, then, is an invitation to have your perspective challenged—or at least to grow by truly considering it. You might stick with a choice you’ve been criticized for or end up somewhere completely different. The endgame isn’t the point as much as the process: you grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again.

Except what remains of the woman that she had been? If you have to change to be loved, then how much is that love worth?

La fin est dans le commencement et cependant on continue.

It’s the opposite.” My throat tightens. “You’re screwed because I’m never going to stop loving you. I’m counting on us getting back together when our lives fit better. You’re endgame for me. But you have to promise me you’re not going to be stupid and walk into traffic. Don’t die at all. Okay?” “Fine.

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth for the other. Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other. Now you are two persons, but there are three lives before you: His life, Her Life, and Your life together.

Then one day, suddenly, it ends, it changes, I don’t understand, it dies, or it’s me, I don’t understand that either. I ask the words that remain— sleeping, waking, morning, evening. They have nothing to say.

I choose to be the person that i want to be

Allie hated this. Why couldn’t they have even a day to be normal kids in a normal school, with their A levels the biggest obstacle ahead of them?

Do I need to share the meaning of stalker?

Love is like a game of chess. You're white. He's black. You wait for him to make a move, while staring into his handsome, melting-you-on-the-inside eyes, then realize what a dummy he is to not tell you straight out to go first. The beginning is the crush stage. You begin to realize how much you want to defeat him, or make him fall in love with you. By the time you get to the heat of the game, you both moved and are hopefully dating. If you haven't forfeit then because you don't want to be cheated on, you make another move- head on shoulder, hand holding, etc. Black makes another move-he gives you his jacket on a freezing night. By the endgame, he either realizes how stupid he was to play with you and forfeits, or he realizes how smart you are and lets you defeat him (and love you). By the time you win, you're married to him. A happily ever after game of chess.

„Ti si najneverovatnija osoba koju sam ikad upoznao”, prošaputa on. „Pristao bih da budem zatočen stotinu godina ako bih znao da ću na kraju biti s tobom.” Carter West & Allie Sheridan

I say to myself—sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you—one day. I say to myself—sometimes, Clov, you must be better than that if you want them to let you go—one day. But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits. Good, it'll never end, I'll never go.

My secret is that I choose to be the person that I want to be. That I don't believe in destiny or predetermination, but in choice, and that each of us chooses to be the person we are. Whatever you want to be you can be, whatever you want to do you can do, wherever you want to go you can go. The world, and the life ahead, is ours for the taking. The future is unwritten, and you can make it whatever you want it to be

She’s pretty, but her face doesn’t transform into sunlight when she talks about music.” He did that clench thing with his jaw and said, “She’s funny, but not spit-out-your-drink-in-astonishment funny.” It felt like my heart was going to explode as his eyes moved down to my lips under the glow of the buzzing streetlight. He moved his face a little closer to mine, looked into my eyes, and rumbled, “And when I see her, I don’t feel like I have to talk to her or mess up her hair or do something—anything—to get her to swing that gaze on me. He raised one eyebrow, an unspoken question, and I realized at that moment that I wanted it. I wanted Wes. Michael had been my endgame, but I couldn’t bring myself to care about that anymore. I wouldn’t run through a train station for Michael. But I would do it for Wes. Holy shit.

Just as there are different types of stars—red and white and brown and blue and dwarf and giant and all that lot—there are different types of Quests, and if we determine what type you face, we shall have a much easier time managing the whole business. We’re doing very well. Already we know that Prince Myrrh is an Endgame Object Type W—that’s Wonderful, since we have yet to see if he will be any Use in governing. He sleeps suspended in a Theseus-type narrative matrix, however he does seem to have some gravitational pull on events, which is unusual for a T-Type. After all, we still remember him even after all these years. It’s far easier to forget something than to remember it. Remembering takes all kinds of magic. No one knows who he is or what he looks like or where to find him, and yet we all know of him. We all know he sleeps in an unopenable box on an unbreakable bower. That’s a frightfully strong E.K.T. Field for one little creature!

When the rush of the weak sweeps over those that strive to be strong, its destruction. The commonplaces of moral judgment become fogged with the lack of perception stained with the sting of longing. The voice of reason is lost in the envious echoes of hearts torn by battle. The song of our children echo the misfortune of their parent's haze---we all started out small and had dreams to become something more than what we were.

He had visited his family the evening before, eaten dinner with Renee and Chris, his grandson, in the pretence that everything was ordinary, but in fact to service his end-game ruse. He was going over the mountains, he'd said, to hunt for quail in willow canyons, he had no particular canyons in mind, he intended to return on Thursday evening, though possibly, if the hunting was good, he would return on Friday or Saturday. The lie was open-ended so that his family wouldn't start worrying until he'd been dead for as long as a week - so none would miss or seek him where he rotted silently in the sage. Ben imagined how it might be otherwise, his cancer a pestilent force in their lives, or a pall descending over them like ice, just as they'd begun to emerge from the pall of Rachel's death. The last thing they needed was for Ben to tell hem of his terminal colon cancer.

Clov: Why this farce, day after day? Hamm: Routine. One never knows. [Pause.] Last night I saw inside my breast. There was a big sore. Clov: Pah! You saw your heart. Hamm: No, it was living. [Pause. Anguished.] Clov! Clov: Yes. Hamm: What's happening? Clov: Something is taking its course. [Pause.] Hamm: Clov! Clov: [impatiently] What is it? Hamm: We're not beginning to ... to ... mean something? Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! [Brief laugh.] Ah that's a good one! Hamm: I wonder. [Pause.]

HAMM: In my house. (pause.) One day you’ll be blind, like me. You’ll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me. (pause.) One day you’ll say to yourself, I’m tired, I’ll sit down, and you’ll go and sit down. Then you’ll say, I’m hungry, I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up. You’ll say, I shouldn’t have sat down, but since I have I’ll sit on a little longer, then I’ll get up and get something to eat. But you won’t get up and you won’t get anything to eat. (pause.) You’ll look at the wall a while, then you’ll say, I’ll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I’ll feel better, and you’ll close them. And when you open them again there’ll be no wall any more. (pause.) Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn’t fill it, and there you’ll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe. (pause.) Yes, one day you’ll know what it is, you’ll be like me, except that you won’t have anyone with you, because you won’t have had pity on anyone and because there won’t be anyone left to have pity on. (pause.)

I am as you see me. I am happy and able because I allow myself to be happy. I learned young that being active breeds more activity. That the gift of studying is knowledge. That seeing grants sight. That if you don't feel anger, you won't be angry. Sadness and frustration, even tragedy, are inevitable, but that doesn't mean that happiness isn't there for us, for all of us. My secret is that I choose to be the person that I want to be. That I don't believe in destiny or predetermination, but in choice, and that each of us chooses to be the person we are. Whatever you want to be you can be; whatever you want to do you can do; wherever you want to go you can go. The world, and the life ahead, is ours for the taking. The future is unwritten, and you can make it whatever you want it to be.

Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon? Clov: (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name would there be on the horizon? (Pause.) Hamm: The waves, how are the waves? Clov: The waves? (He turns the telescope on the waves.) Lead. Hamm: And the sun? Clove: (Looking) Zero. Hamm: But it should be sinking. Look again. Clov: (Looking) Damn the sun. Hamm: Is it night already then? Clov: (Looking) No. Hamm: Then what is it? Clov: (Looking) Gray. (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, louder.) Gray! (Pause, still louder.) GRRAY!

The first time he had hit her, he had been so wracked with remorse, she had actually felt sorry for him. Consumed by guilt and self-loathing, he had sobbed in her arms like a child, swearing it would never happen again and begging for her forgiveness. Her stomach turned over now at the thought of how she had comforted him, assuring him that she trusted him and promising that she would never leave. She saw now with sickening clarity that she had been setting a precedent - giving him permission to do it again; reassuring him that she would tolerate anything. If only she had walked out there and then.

I wish I had asked myself when I was younger. My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted— accurately— that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore. And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. the best paths are new and untried. will this business still be around a decade from now? business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else. The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned. Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.