Completeness Quotes (page 27)
he saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings? all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or...
Jack Kerouac
We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well. And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection--which we have ourselves created.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It was ironic, but when you scratched the surface, most successful men were working for one thing only--to retire--and the sooner the better. Whereas women were the complete opposite. She had never heard a woman say she was working so she could retire to a desert island or to live on a boat. It was probably, she thought, because most women didn't think they deserved to do nothing.
Candace Bushnell
I guess I should say a little bit about my method - I really am a fence sitter. I *loathe* Science and am always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love Reason and I'm perfectly aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like Rules of Evidence. I'm not sure that's a concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be - in other words, how *do* you tell shit from shinola? That's very critical. I think reason can only take us a...
Terence McKenna
That so many of the well fed young television-watchers in the world's most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. "Free as a bird", we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But alas, we forget the dodo. Any bird that has learned how to grub up a good living without...
Aldous Huxley
IGNORANCE
I didn’t know love would make me this
crazy, with my eyes
like the river Ceyhun
carrying me in its rapids
out to sea, where every bit
of shattered boat
sinks to the bottom.
An alligator lifts its head and swallows
the ocean, then the ocean
floor becomes
a desert covering
the alligator in
sand drifts.
Changes do
happen. I do not know how,
or what remains of what
has disappeared
into the absolute.
I hear so many stories
and explanations, but I keep quiet,
because I don’t know...
Rumi
Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, "Yes, yes, yes," as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT-the root, the soul of Beatific.
Jack Kerouac
what is it you have, or don't have, that you sit there completely self-contained, that you can sit and know . . . and know exactly where your feet are? Yes, that's what makes cats incredible, because you know they're aware every instant of where their feet are, and they know how much they have to share with other cats, they don't try to . . . pretend . . .
William Gaddis
I was completely out of clean clothes. That meant I could be a slut and sleep naked , or I could be a slob and sleep in what I was wearing. Truth is, I'm not entirely comfortable sleeping naked. I do it from time to time, but I worry that God might be watching or that my mother might find out, and I'm pretty sure they both think nice girls should wear pyjamas to bed.
Janet Evanovich