"There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning"
About this Quote
Apocalypse is doing double duty here: it ends a world, then clears the lot for whatever comes next. Louis L'Amour, the great popular mythmaker of American reinvention, takes a feeling most people recognize - the moment your story seems to slam shut - and flips it into a frontier plot twist. Not optimism as a mood, but optimism as a structure: the sentence breaks you down, then rebuilds you.
The craft is in the timing and the pronouns. "There will come a time" sounds like weather, not choice; it grants inevitability to despair, which makes the reader feel seen rather than scolded. Then "you believe" narrows it: the catastrophe is psychological, not necessarily literal. The word "finished" is deliberately blunt, almost adolescent in its finality, capturing how grief and failure talk when they want the last word. L'Amour doesn't argue with that voice. He lets it speak, then undercuts it with "Yet" - a hinge so small it feels like a private intervention.
Context matters: L'Amour wrote in the long shadow of the Depression and war, building novels where men are stranded, broke, outgunned, and still moving. His heroes don't get rescued by fate; they improvise new identities on hard ground. The subtext is distinctly American, for better and worse: endings are just unclaimed territory. Read generously, it's permission to survive your own collapse. Read skeptically, it can sound like a cultural reflex to convert loss into productivity. Either way, it works because it treats despair as real - and temporary.
The craft is in the timing and the pronouns. "There will come a time" sounds like weather, not choice; it grants inevitability to despair, which makes the reader feel seen rather than scolded. Then "you believe" narrows it: the catastrophe is psychological, not necessarily literal. The word "finished" is deliberately blunt, almost adolescent in its finality, capturing how grief and failure talk when they want the last word. L'Amour doesn't argue with that voice. He lets it speak, then undercuts it with "Yet" - a hinge so small it feels like a private intervention.
Context matters: L'Amour wrote in the long shadow of the Depression and war, building novels where men are stranded, broke, outgunned, and still moving. His heroes don't get rescued by fate; they improvise new identities on hard ground. The subtext is distinctly American, for better and worse: endings are just unclaimed territory. Read generously, it's permission to survive your own collapse. Read skeptically, it can sound like a cultural reflex to convert loss into productivity. Either way, it works because it treats despair as real - and temporary.
Quote Details
| Topic | New Beginnings |
|---|
More Quotes by Louis
Add to List
