Quotes About Perfectionism

The French press can be very harsh, and the one thing they can't bear is multi-tasking. They despise it to the highest degree, so from the age of five I've been taught that if I did two things at the same time, it meant I didn't know how to do one. It's an obsession that they have.

The problem with people is that no matter how good you are at what you do, it's never enough for them. There will always be someone to point out some flaw. Someone will always find something lacking in you.

There's a part of me that feels like it gets really frustrating to keep working in the manner that I made the book 'Shortcomings,' where everything is pretty accurate to the real world.

Oh, the secret of a great club is all in the detail. When I walk into one of my bars, I have to have all my napkins a certain way and all the pourers in the bottles facing a certain way. It drives some people crazy, but I figure if I notice something's off, then other people will notice it, too.

I missed a lot of life being the perfect student.

It was the pressure of being told two things: 1. That I only had a short amount of time, and 2. That I had to get everything right.

But then, I've always been terrible at math.

I wasn't good enough. I had a little talent but not enough. There is nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.

Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.

Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with.

If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further.

We are never satisfied with what we have done. We know that our best is never adequate. If I had to be satisfied with what I have written I'd still be on my first novel. But I wrote what was for me the best book I could write at that moment in time.

There were women who fussed about their homes as if they thought life were a permanent examination where they would be found wanting.

But the problem was, Sacks wasn't comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even

Then again, it seemed my mother was always displeased with all her friends, with me, and even with my father. Something was always missing. Something always needed improving. Something was not in balance. This one or that had too much of one element, not enough of another.

The pages were all right—neither good nor bad, neither fish nor fowl. As I read them I seemed to hear the original lines from which they were abstracted, saw the wavering handwriting, and the curious childlike drawings, the mistakes, the bad spelling, the ink spots, the greasy finger-prints, the cheap paper (which is so touching in itself—the cheapest for genius always!). I rebelled

One broken window—a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project—is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it's all too easy to slip into the mindset of All the rest of this code is crap, I'll just follow suit.

Barbara appraised her with critical eyes. 'Oh my. Well, this is going to need some work.' She went right to Carmen's hips and pulled the unfinished seams open. 'Yes, we'll have to take this way out. I'm not sure I have enough fabric. I'll check when I get back to my office.' You are a horrible witch, Carmen thought. She knew she looked absolutely awful in the dress. She was part Bourbon Street whore and part Latina first-communion spectacle.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The work is performed, first by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance, and asinine tastelessness of the former editors

Once, I did a halfhearted job of sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor, and that's the first place she checked because she knew I'd do a lousy job because "that's the kind of kid you are." As in I'm not a "go-getter who makes her own luck" like she is, so I'm "never going to get anywhere in this world." She knew all that because of two missed Cheerios and a small dust bunny.

The only thing I can't stand more than seeing something done wrong is seeing it done slowly.

Her life was perfect. But as was often the case, the rest of us were still adjusting.

No ha sido esa larga enfermedad -mi vida- sino esa larga convalecencia, también mi vida. La revisión liberal-burguesa, la ilusión del perfeccionamiento, el veneno de la esperanza.