Quotes About Incompleteness

I've always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won't be finished until I am dead and buried and I hope that's a long, long time.

His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned something greater, far greater perhaps than he ever knew. A writer cannot really grasp what he has written. It is not like a building or a sculpture; it cannot be seen whole. It is only a kind of smoke seized and printed on a page.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

WHEREVER I AM, I AM WHAT IS MISSING.

or incompleteness, either in the physical or in the emotional personality of a man, he is not capable of invoking and directing thereafter the efficient play of his emotional and intellectual abilities.

It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't everything either.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing.

As a number of people have stressed over the years, I think it would be premature to assume science itself will explain everything.

There are holes in our lives that can never be filled - not really, not ever.

We may find that we're habitually focused on incompleteness. We have thoughts such as "I am unworthy, I am lacking, the world is nothing but problems." With this outlook, we will see imperfection wherever we look and always feel dissatisfied.

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?

She was so full of holes now, she was like a Swiss cheese.

A thousand and one is still only a thousand. That one seems never to have existed: a

First of all, I must make it clear that this girl does not know herself apart from the fact that she goes on living aimlessly. Were she foolish enough to ask herself 'Who am I?', she would fall flat on her face. For the question 'Who am I?' creates a need. And how does one satisfy that need? To probe oneself is to recognize that one is incomplete.

The nature of reaching, the nature of whispered entreaties, a thousand variations on the same invitation, is that both the reaching of hands and the question in question invariably lead to moments of complete incompleteness. Because the upshot of coupling is uncoupling. The essence of association is disassociation. Because you can fuck till you're blue, but at a certain point the inevitable nightly drawing apart happens for good. [Walt Kaplan/23 Kaplan's Furniture]

Nothing is whole, not for too damned long. The world is half night.

But empty-with empty, you are aware of what's supposed to be there. Empty means something is missing.

I mean, certainly, not everyone sucks in the same way, and not everyone sucks equally, but everyone sucks at least a little.

I felt there was a piece of me missing, a piece that had become so unnerved that it fell away without me feeling it. I didn't even know what piece it was-I just felt the gap, and knew that whatever it was, it must have been important.

He knows he is missing something. He is always missing something. He can never get past the first step of finding it, which is knowing what it is.

The action carries a sense of incompleteness and frustration, but not of guilt. Victorious living does not mean perfect living in the sense of living without flaw, but it does mean adequate living, and that can be consistent with many mistakes.

A lifetime with such a woman was not nearly enough.

There was no twinkle in his eyes. Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough. Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn't understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn't work that way.

I think of all the times we're together as a group of friends and I can't help but realize that somethings missing...