Incompletion Quotes

Think nothing done while aught remains to do.

Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

As long as we live there is never enough singing.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like the state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

Nobody wants to see a half-finished Vine.

So little done, so much to do.

...sometimes a start is all we ever get.

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.

Completeness? Happiness? These words don't come close to describing my emotions. There truly is nothing I can say to capture what motherhood means to me, particularly given my medical history.

I never know when a record is finished until it's almost finished.

I hate the word 'potential'-potential means you haven't gotten it done.

First snow-falling-on the half-finished bridge.

But I'm always dreaming, even when I'm awake; it is never finished." -the Lady Amalthea, from The Last Unicorn

Each painting, I feel like I kind of might have gotten something. If I feel like I totally got it, there's probably something wrong and it's not finished. And if I really feel like I understand it then I'm done with these paintings and I'll have to do something else.

Movies are not finished. They are abandoned. A movie is never finished.

I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

Many men build as cathedrals are built-the part nearest the ground finished, but that part which soars toward heaven, the turrets and the spires, forever incomplete.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy.

Nature is never finished.

Were it not for this [dissatisfaction], the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. The process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process is in fact habit-forming.

Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it's the only way they can get anything really finished.

One could do with a longer year - so much to do, so little done, alas.

Remember one very fundamental thing about life: Any experience that has not been lived will hang around you, will persist: "Finish me! Live me! Complete me!" There is an intrinsic quality in every experience that it tends and wants to be finished, completed. Once completed, it evaporates; incomplete, it persists, it tortures you, it haunts you, it attracts your attention. It says, "What are you going to do about me? I am still incomplete - fulfill me!"