Quotes about completion
page 7

“It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.”

René Descartes book Meditations on First Philosophy

Variant: ... it is a mark of prudence never to place our complete trust in those who have deceived us even once.
Source: Meditations on First Philosophy

Confidence

“I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Quest

Source: Assassin's Quest

“He had escaped the abhorrent taint! He was truly completely alone! He was the only human being in the world!”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

World

“Memory is like plaster: peel it back and you just might find a completely different picture.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Source: Handle with Care

Memory

“We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Life, Reading

“I don't believe there's any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can't completely ignore.”

George Carlin book Brain Droppings

Source: Brain Droppings

Problem, Country

“Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

Source: My Reading Life

Books, Feeling, Literature, Parting

“I never, even for a moment, doubted what they’d told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Imagination, Parent

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book Half of a Yellow Sun

Source: Half of a Yellow Sun

Death

“Don't be afraid of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Sense

“And I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty seperate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

World, Reality, Housing

“And the worst thing was, there were no mirrors out there in the wild, so the princess was left wondering whether she in fact was still beautiful… or if the fall had changed the story completely.”

Scott Westerfeld book Pretties

Source: Pretties

Beauty, Change, Princess

“May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Perfection

“By definition, you have to live until you die. Better to make that life as complete and enjoyable an experience as possible, in case death is shite, which I suspect it will be.”

Irvine Welsh book Trainspotting

Source: Trainspotting

Life, Death

“You guys are weird," Tori said.
Simon sat on the crate beside me. "That's right. We are totally weird and completely uncool. Your popularity is plummeting just by being near us.”

Kelley Armstrong The Awakening

Source: The Awakening

Guy

“Some of the most relaxing weekends I have ever enjoyed were those I spent quietly with a sense of all work to date completed, and an absorbing mystery.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Letters from Burma

Source: Letters from Burma

Sense

“I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Source: The Akhmatova Journals, Volume I: 1938-1941

Love, Pain, Fear

“The Bible makes it clear that every time that there is a story of faith, it is completely original. God's creative genius is endless.”

Eugene H. Peterson (1932–2018) American translator

God, Faith, Time

“Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave—a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend.”

Michel Houellebecq (1956) writer

Source: Submission

Literature

“To her own heart it was a delightful affair, to her imagination it was even a ridiculous one, but to her reason, her judgment, it was completely a puzzle.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Source: Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay

Imagination, Heart

“Love meant something to her, she dreamt of it, thought of it, wrote of it. It was the one thing in life that had eluded her completely.”

Danielle Steel (1947) American author of romance novels

Love, Life

“He took a step closer. "I don't know if I'll ever get you out of my system, not completely. I have this… feeling. That you'll always be there. Here." Conrad clawed at his heart and then dropped his hand.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: We'll Always Have Summer

Feeling, Heart

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

essay, first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (1950)

World, Weather

“it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night”

Banana Yoshimoto book Asleep

Source: Asleep

Color, Night

“I think I have this thing where everybody has to think I'm the greatest. And if they aren't completely knocked out and dazzled and slightly intimidated by me, I don't feel good about myself.”

Roald Dahl (1916–1990) British novelist, short story writer, poet, fighter pilot and screenwriter

Source: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Feeling, Thinking

“Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Love, Faith, Hope, Personality

“There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Pleasure, Beauty, Silence, Joy

“Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth

God, Beauty, Lovers

“You all right now?"
"I'm exceptional. Wonderful. Thanks for the concern. You complete me.”

Kathy Reichs Virals

Source: Virals

“It is the same way with dating. The time you are most prepared for dating is when you don't need anyone to complete you, fulfill you, or instill in you a sense of worth or purpose.”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: Waiting and Dating

Way, Sense, Time

“Julia looked back at Hadassah on the bloodstained sand. A great emptiness opened within her as she looked at the still form. Gone, too, was the salt that had kept her from completely corruption.”

Francine Rivers book A Voice in the Wind

Source: A Voice in the Wind

“If I behave as though this is a completely normal situation, then maybe it will be…”

Sophie Kinsella book Shopaholic Abroad

Source: Shopaholic Takes Manhattan

“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“If we would spend on education half the amount of money that we currently lavish on sports and entertainment, we could provide complete and free education for every student in this country.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Think Big: Unleashing Your Potential for Excellence

Money, Education, Sport, Country

“It crosses my mind that Cinna's calm and normal demeanor masks a complete madman.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Cinna to Katniss Everdeen, p. 67
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)
Context: "I want the audience to recognize you when you're in the arena," says Cinna dreamily. "Katniss, the girl who was on fire."
It crosses my mind that Cinna's calm and normal demeanor masks a complete madman.

“To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Fate, World, Indifference

“And now for something completely different…”

John Cleese (1939) actor from England

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Life, God

“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

"Wordsworth in the Tropics" in Do What You Will (1929)
Source: Do What You Will: Twelve Essays
Context: Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead. Consistent intellectualism and spirituality may be socially valuable, up to a point; but they make, gradually, for individual death.

Life, People, Nature, Dead

“TRYING TO FILL THE empty SPACE

i don't know
if I will
ever understand
this Ache.
Perhaps it is
simpley and completely
Love and

what

HAPPENS.
at the end.

Loss

November 17, early morning”

Sabrina Ward Harrison (1975) Canadian writer

Source: Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself

Love, Understanding, Loss

“Nobody ever completely means what they say. Even when they think they're telling the truth, there's always something hidden behind their words.”

Orson Scott Card book Shadow of the Giant

Source: Shadow of the Giant

Truth, Thinking

“She had that rare virtue of never existing completely except for that opportune moment”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Trusting God completely means having faith that He knows what is best for your life. You expect Him to keep His promises, help you with problems, and do the impossible when necessary.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

Life, God, Faith, Problem

“But Mary-Lynnette was thinking. Of course she'd like to find somebody who would accept her completely, who would share everything with her.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

Thinking

“The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Age, History, Change

“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Fall 1943
Diary entries (1914 - 1974)
Source: Journals Of Anais Nin Volume 3

Truth, Success

“That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”

Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) British writer

Source: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Sadness, Beauty, Silence, Change

“The psychologist, Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches.”

Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, Fast and Slow

Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

Letter to Louis Untermeyer (1 January 1916)
1910s

Sense, Effort

“I don't know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You'd be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

Smile

“I let go. Lost in oblivion. Dark and silent and complete. I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Hope, Freedom

“Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads"
1910s
Context: Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.

Books, Reading

“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.”

Jane Hirshfield (1953) Poet

Source: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Reading

“Really? Is he running for Worst Boyfriend Ever?"
"In the subcategory of Completely Awesome.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Ghost Town

“I’m full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

Fear

“Love is not enough. It must be the foundation, the cornerstone- but not the complete structure. It is much too pliable, to yielding.”

Bette Davis (1908–1989) film and television actress from the United States

Love

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t
know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder
why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or
steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Business

“The younger one looked to be completely useless.”

Megan Whalen Turner The Thief

Source: The Thief

“Because I was, and I remain, utterly and completely and totally…in love with you.”

Jessica Bird (1969) U.S. novelist

Source: Lover at Last

Love

“The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Life, Truth, Game

“Men Wanted: For hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) Anglo-Irish polar explorer

The first published appearance of this "ad" is on the first page of a 1949 book by Julian Lewis Watkins, The 100 Greatest Advertisements: Who Wrote Them and What They Did. (Moore Publishing Company), except with the Americanized word "honor", rather than "honour".

Men, Success