Quotes About Imperfection

We are imperfect beings, Munira said, How could we ever fit in a perfect world?

What must it have been like to believe in something greater than oneself? To accept imperfection and look to a rising vision of all we could never be? It must have been comforting.

there's no defense except all the errors made

Dismiss perfection as an ache of the greedy, but do not give in to the mass modesty of easy imperfection.

but perhaps it will help if we all realize that perhaps all of us have been pests at one time or another to somebody but we never knew it. shit, it's a horrible thought but most probably true and maybe it will help us bear up under the pest. basically, there is no 100 percent man. we are all run through with various madnesses and uglinesses that we ourselves are not aware of but that everybody else is aware of. how ya gonna keep us down on the farm?

perhaps it will help if we all realize that perhaps all of us have been pests at one time or another to somebody but we never knew it. shit, it's a horrible thought but most probably true and maybe it will help us bear up under the pest. basically, there is no 100 percent man. we are all run through with various madnesses and ugliness that we ourselves are not aware of but that everyone else is aware of.

I sat down and found half a dead cigar in the ashtray. I lit it up, took a drag, gagged. Tried it again. Not too bad.

From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and howls. Nevertheless the beautiful and familiar tune was impervious to poor performance, and Inman thought how painfully young it sounded, as if the pattern of its notes allowed no room to imagine a future clouded and tangled and diminished.

When we discover Zen practice, we may hold out a hope that it is going to solve our problems and make our life perfect. But Zen practice simply returns us to life as it is. Being our lives more and more is what Zen practice is about. Our lives are simply what they are, and Zen helps us to recognize that fact. The thought If I do this practice patiently enough, everything will be different is simply another belief system, another version of the promise that is never kept.

We're only human James, bound by flesh and blood to do the wrong thing. ~Lena Jefferson from The Other Sister

In the context of novel writing, this means you should lower the bar from "best-seller" to "would not make someone vomit." Exuberant imperfection encourages you to write uncritically, to experiment, to break your time-honored rules of writing just to see what happens. In a first draft, nothing is permanent, and everything is fixable. So stay loose and flexible, and keep your expectations very, very low.

fiction writing can be a blast when you set aside debilitating notions of perfection and just dive headlong into the creative process.

The first law of exuberant imperfection is essentially this: The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful and lasting is to risk making something horribly crappy.

All of us make mistakes and the majority of us have missed a day's work for whatever reason.

I told my kids, 'It doesn't matter if this person or that person in the family isn't perfect; this is what you've got. We have to work with that, and if you can't work with that, then you're just jumping into someone else's family, and there's always going to be something missing if you don't work that out.'

But then I quite enjoy when something goes wrong, because when I watch DJs that take it very seriously, it's nice when you make a mistake and laugh about it.

If I were to say at any point that I feel really confident or really in control, that would be a mistake. Because I don't. I always see where I didn't do things the right way.

Nobody's perfect. And if you think they are, you're sadly mistaken.

We all make mistakes. God knows I've made more than anyone else I know.

Every human being makes mistakes.

Nobody bats 500. We all make mistakes.

Everyone is flawed and everyone makes mistakes and is culpable.

We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

We're all men, not machines. We make mistakes.