Life & Wisdom Quote by Spider Robinson

A beginning rarely gets to stay innocent. Spider Robinson’s line snaps the ribbon off the gift and shows the empty box underneath: every start is a termination dressed up as possibility. It’s a deliberately tight paradox, the kind science-fiction writers love because it smuggles philosophy into a sentence you can’t shake. “Always” is the knife twist. He isn’t allowing the comforting exception where we imagine we can add new chapters without closing any old ones.

The intent feels less like cynicism than calibration. Robinson is warning against the cultural addiction to “fresh starts” as pure upward motion: new job, new love, new city, new identity. Those narratives sell optimism, but they blur the cost. A beginning ends the version of you who hadn’t begun yet; it kills the floating potential of what might have happened. That’s why the line lands: it frames change not as a door opening but as a door swinging shut behind you, locking in a choice.

The subtext is also about time’s one-way physics. Beginnings are moments where the future collapses into a single track, where uncertainty becomes history. That’s a very SF sensibility: in a multiverse of options, commitment is a kind of violence against alternate selves.

Contextually, Robinson wrote in a genre obsessed with first contact, upgrades, and reinvention. By tethering “beginning” to “end,” he punctures the glossy futurism and insists on a more human ledger: every leap forward is also a loss, and pretending otherwise just makes the loss hit harder when it arrives.