Top Ten Tuesdays: Best Beginnings and Endings

Hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

Beginnings

    

Jess stares at me in disbelief.  "What do you mean, you're moving to England?"

Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away.  That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back.  She didn't like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes.  Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere.  To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place.  And that's why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Miri woke to the insistent bleating of a goat. [I love how the line from the first book is repeated.]

"Just be yourself," my mother said, as if that were easy.  Which it isn't.  Ever.  Especially not when you're fifteen and don't know what language you're going to have to speak at lunch, or what name you'll have to use the next time you do a "project" for extra credit.  Not when your nickname is the Chameleon.

Not when you go to a school for spies.

The end of the world started when a pegasus landed on the hood of my car.

Endings-WARNING: SOME OF THESE CONTAIN SPOILERS

While a group of acrobats performed in the center of the tables, raising cheers and shouts of astonishment from the crowd, Wilhelm and Rose slipped out a side door.  Hand in hand they hurried toward the stairs and the life that had been planned for them since before they were born.

If Gabe's life was a book, it was time for the next chapter.  And he was ready.

Soon, the whole world would be searching for her—Linh Cinder. A deformed cyborg with a missing foot... A mechanic with no one to run to, nowhere to go. But they would be looking for a ghost.

[These are a few of the lines on the last page, but they're not the last one.] 

"One more time?  For the audience?" he says.  His voice isn't angry.  It's hollow, which is worse.  Already the boy with the bread is slipping away from me.

Maybe Macey was right and they would meet again.  Then Kat thought about her new friends on the right side of the law and wondered whether that would be a good thing  or a bad thing.  But in the end she merely shrugged, knowing at the very least it would be interesting.  Knowing, in her gut, it might just be the beginning.