“Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.”
Source: Hope in the Dark
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Rebecca Solnit 45
Author and essayist from United States 1961Related quotes

“Beauty and ingenuity beat perfection hands down, every time.”
Source: Sister Mine

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 131

Thomas Nashe, Preface to Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589), cited from G. Gregory Smith (ed.) Elizabethan Critical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904) vol. 1, p. 315.
Criticism

“In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection.”
May 11, 1935, published in Fire : From "A Journal of Love" : the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934-1937 (1995)
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
Misquoted as "Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." by Laurence J. Peter in "Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time", among many others.
Following the Equator (1897)
Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World