#incompleteness

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations. ↗

— Paul Valéry

#transformation #weariness #work #writing #death

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence. ↗

— Edmond de Goncourt

#been #begin #book #each #exists

The true genius shudders at incompleteness - and usually prefers silence to saying something which is not everything it should be. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#genius #incompleteness #prefers #saying #should

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness. ↗

— V. S. Naipaul

#autobiography #biography #even #incompleteness #will

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. ↗

— E. Stanley Jones

#adequate #carries #consistent #does #flaw

There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#perception #science #science

True love is a developed and intense appreciation for someone. It’s that perfect awareness that you are finally whole when she’s with you, and that hollow incompleteness you suffer when she’s gone. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#derian #devotion #eena #incompleteness #love

But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts. ↗

— Richard Owen

#before #darwin #elude #facts #history

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said. ↗

— Edgar Allan Poe

#imperfection #incompleteness #shudder #silence #silence