#perfection

Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#language #perfection #relatives #death

This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfections. ↗

— Saint Augustine

#his #imperfections #man #out #own

7 - VI Quizá debemos aprender que lo imperfecto es otra forma de la perfección: la forma que la perfección asume para poder ser amada. ↗

— Roberto Juarroz

#life-and-living #love #life

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story. ↗

— Charles Baxter

#discovery #fiction #mystery #overdetermination #perfection

As a real person, he wouldn't last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we've moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House's friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don't always like morally good people, do we? ↗

— Hugh Laurie

#always #away #be happy #drama #dull

Perfectionism becomes a badge of honor with you playing the part of the suffering hero. ↗

— David D. Burns

#becomes #hero #honor #part #perfectionism

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it. ↗

— Reinhold Niebuhr

#achieving #capable #conceiving #him #his

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell. ↗

— Ben Okri

#fundamental #hints #human #imperfection #perfection

The attractive idea that we can now have a parliament of man with authority to control the conduct of nations by legislation or an international police force with power to enforce national conformity to rules of right conduct is a counsel of perfection. ↗

— Elihu Root

#authority #conduct #conformity #control #counsel

Our erected wit maketh us to know what perfection is. ↗

— Philip Sidney

#know #maketh #our #perfection #us