Life & Wisdom Quote by Frank Yerby

Yerby’s line has the clean snap of a closing door that doesn’t actually latch. “When it was over” promises finality, the kind of neat narrative resolution novels and polite society both pretend to deliver. Then he yanks it away: “it was not really over.” The repetition is deliberate, almost taunting, forcing the reader to feel the gap between an ending that’s been declared and an ending that’s been lived. The last clause - “and that was the trouble” - is the real knife. Not heartbreak, not villainy, not some grand tragedy: trouble. Mundane word, catastrophic implications. It frames unresolved aftermath as the most corrosive condition, the thing that turns memory into an irritant you can’t stop scratching.

Yerby, a bestselling novelist who wrote about power, race, romance, and historical violence, understood that “over” is often a social decision, not an emotional or political reality. People announce closure because it’s useful: wars “end,” affairs “end,” injustices are “past,” families “move on.” The subtext is that the world rewards the performance of closure while punishing the mess of continuation. What lingers is inconvenient: consequences, guilt, desire, structural harm.

The sentence works because it sounds like someone trying to be reasonable and failing. It’s the voice of a person (or a culture) attempting to narrate themselves into safety, only to admit the plot won’t cooperate. Yerby turns aftermath into the central drama: the long, unglamorous sequel where the bill finally arrives.