Unfinished Quotes

There is a place called 'heaven' where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued. We may laugh together yet. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Women are in the midst of an unfinished revolution. ~ Gloria Feldt

She needs you, Dad," Julia says. "She has unfinished business in this world."
"What is the matter with you?" Charlie asks his daughter. "Any sane person would have told me to go to the doctor. I'm seeing a headless apparition every day. Maybe my medications are conflicting. You should see the list of side effects on this stuff. ~ Joey Comeau

And so it was, that their beautiful love ended up being in the realms of the unknown, thrown to the future, pending, undeveloped, and unfinished. Always on the periphery. ~ Shahd Alshammari

An unfinished feeling. ~ Sylvia Plath

When the past knocks on your door, it's because there's unfinished business. ~ R.C. Boldt

The central conception of Man in the Gospels is that he is an unfinished creation capable of reaching a higher level by a definite evolution which must begin by his own efforts. ~ Maurice Nicoll

I think you kept three credits, consciously or subconsciously, so that you could hang on to something, hang on and not move forward. I think you want to feel that you're still unfinished.
She wanted to tell her grandmother that she was still unfinished. Unfinished, unanswered, unformed. ~ Paullina Simons

At This Moment Of Time

Some who are uncertain compel me. They fear
The Ace of Spades. They fear
Loves offered suddenly, turning from the mantelpiece,
Sweet with decision. And they distrust
The fireworks by the lakeside, first the spuft,
Then the colored lights, rising.
Tentative, hesitant, doubtful, they consume
Greedily Caesar at the prow returning,
Locked in the stone of his act and office.
While the brass band brightly bursts over the water
They stand in the crowd lining the shore
Aware of the water beneath Him. They know it. Their eyes
Are haunted by water

Disturb me, compel me. It is not true
That "no man is happy," but that is not
The sense which guides you. If we are
Unfinished (we are, unless hope is a bad dream),
You are exact. You tug my sleeve
Before I speak, with a shadow's friendship,
And I remember that we who move
Are moved by clouds that darken midnight ~ Delmore Schwartz

Way I see it, maybe it's not so unfair, as unfinished. If you stopped in the middle of a lot of stories, they'd seem unfair. You're still in the middle of yours. ~ Mia Sheridan

As love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy. ~ Aphra Behn

I want to live in such a way that, if it is only twenty-nine more days or twenty-nine more weeks, or if it is twenty-nine more years or more, I want to faithful with each one of those-that I could go and meet the Lord without regrets, without unfinished business. ~ Nancy Leigh DeMoss

Something like that, he said, his eyes shining, and she realized just how much there was she didn't know about him. He was like one of her novels, still unfinished and best understood in the right place and at the right time. She couldn't wait to read the rest. ~ Jennifer E. Smith

In reality," he told Paulina, after knowing her a short time, "endings are unworthy of art. Works of art are always unfinished. Whoever creates them is never sure of having finished them. The same is true of all the best things in life. Goethe, even though he was a German, was right about this: 'Every beginning is beautiful, but one must stop on the threshold. ~ Angeles Mastretta

The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces. ~ Mary Antin

you're gone and
your unfinished poem
lies alone
on my desk -
empty of tears,
I only hope
it rains today ~ John J. Geddes

I don't like to leave anything unfinished. I have an absolute need to see that every phone call is returned, every letter answered. ~ Alan W. Livingston

When you left
you left behind a field
of silent flowers
under a sky
full of unstirred clouds...you left
a million butterflies
mid-silky flutters

You left like midnight rain
against my dreaming ears

Oh and how you left
leaving my coffee scentless
and my couch comfortless

leaving upon my fingers
the melting snow of you

you left behind
a calendar full of empty days
and seasons full of aimless wanders

leaving me alone
with an armful of sunsets

your reflection behind
in every puddle
your whispers
upon every curtain
your fragrance
inside every petal

you left your echoes in between
the silence of my eyes

Oh and how you left
leaving my sands footless
and my shores songless

leaving me with windows full of
moistened moonlight

nights and nights
of only a half-warmed soul

and when you left...
you left behind a lifetime
of moments untouched

the light of a million stars
unshed

and when you left
you somehow
left my poem...unfinished.



(Published in Taj Mahal Review Vol.11
Number 1 June 2012) ~ Sanober Khan

Many people wake up in middle age with the realization that in their youthful romances and early marriages, they were drawn to precisely the kinds of partners they were trying to avoid. All too often we marry stand-ins for our alchoholic fathers, shadowy replacements for our angry mothers, surrogates with whom we try to work out our unfinished childhood dramas. Or we fall in love with someone who incarnates the virtues or vices opposite our own. An orderly man who plans his days marries a spontaneous woman who lets things lie where they fall, lives in the moment, and is perpetually late for appointments. ~ Sam Keen

She murmured, "You're unfinished."
"Aye, precisely."
"I need to go."
When she moved to get up, he shoved her against his side and slapped her arse to keep her there. "You stay with me."
She snapped, "What do you want from me, Chase?"
He drew his head back in confusion. "I want everything. You're mine, Regin. ~ Kresley Cole

...only when a man dies can his life acquire a beginning, middle, and an end: up until then we are constantly unfinished, even the midpoint cannot be located. So only the final word finds the middle word and this, in a way becomes a verse--one's death explains oneself. ~ Colum McCann

He couldn't fit the two things together. It gave him a jagged, unfinished feeling, like the first pinprick of heartbreak, a tiny pointed lance of light beaming on something you can't bear to see, can't bring yourself to look at, can't look away from. ~ Roxana Robinson

A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how". ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved - whether by their superiors or by a client - supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In ~ Daniel Kahneman

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished brain. Whoever wrote the line bootlicker, sycophant, toady intended damage, understood how Carla would feel, how anybody would feel, being called such names. The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch. The writer was having fun. Amy had been comfortable in the same room with someone whose idea of fun this was. ~ Jincy Willett

I'm unfinished. I'm unfixed. And the reality is that's where God meets me is in the mess of my life, in the unfixedness, in the brokenness. I thought he did the opposite, he got rid of all that stuff. But if you read the Bible, if you look at it at all, constantly he was showing up in people's lives at the worst possible time of their life. ~ Mike Yaconelli

I am a poem in progress
with no clear beginning or ending
just a middle
untended, unintended,
unfinished, hanging there
like the breath before a question ~ Jen Lynn Anderson

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a god, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn't deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn't always respect what we believe is the end of life. It will deal your last card to those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. ~ Andre Aciman

The question hung unfinished between them, stretched over the desert, emblazoned like a sword that pierced through his heart, through her heart, and out like a bloodied ship mast rising on sandy waves. ~ Devon Trevarrow Flaherty

In my loneliness…I found you
In my darkness... I found you
In my insanity…. I found you
In the chaos of the world... you and I found love
But you and I will always remain an unfinished story! ~ Avijeet Das

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished question. ~ Mary McCarthy

Sugar leans her chin against the knuckles of the hand that holds the pen. Glistening on the page between her silk-shrouded elbows lies an unfinished sentence. The heroine of her novel has just slashed the throat of a man. The problem is how, precisely, the blood will flow. Flow is too gentle a word; spill implies carelessness; spurt is out of the question because she has used the word already, in another context, a few lines earlier. Pour out implies that the man has some control over the matter, which he most emphatically doesn't; leak is too feeble for the savagery of the injury she has inflicted upon him. Sugar closes her eyes and watches, in the lurid theatre of her mind, the blood issue from the slit neck. When Mrs Castaway's warning bell sounds, she jerks in surprise.
Hastily, she scrutinises her bedroom. Everything is neat and tidy. All her papers are hidden away, except for this single sheet on her writing-desk.
Spew, she writes, having finally been given, by tardy Providence, the needful word. ~ Michel Faber

There was, he knew, within him, hidden deep and far away, a great slumbering turbulence he could neither understand nor reach, a turbulence that was also a void, the business of unfinished things. ~ Richard Flanagan

Know Your Warning Signs That You've Persisted Too Long

Because anxiety causes thinking to get narrow and rigid, it can sometimes cause you to persist too long on certain tasks. Since anxious perfectionists tend to be particular and don't like unfinished tasks hanging over their heads, they can be especially vulnerable to this trap. Know the signs that you need to stop persisting. For example, if you work online, one of your personal signs of overpersistence might be that you've searched a forum for over 30 minutes looking for a solution to a problem and haven't found it. This would be a cue that taking a break from trying to solve your problem is likely to be more effective than banging away at it. Another example might be if you've been trying to convince your partner of something for over 10 minutes. You've explained your point of view several different ways, and you're still at loggerheads.
Define your overpersistence warning signs in objective and specific ways. This will make it harder to ignore them than if your definitions were fuzzy. ~ Alice Boyes

Yeah. Book nerd rule number three: never ever, leave an unfinished book at home. ~ J.J. McAvoy

I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden. ~ Michel De Montaigne

What was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in the unfinished. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

The final, unfinished fugue from The Art of Fugue is the greatest piece of music ever composed. ~ Glenn Gould

Like you, I grew up in a remote animist village. But then I went to a strict Catholic education in France. I was perfectly content to accept the grand Shee Yee of the Otherworld and the Lord B, and Jesus and his mother as my spiritual icons as long as I didn't have to spend too long on my knees. I would have settled for a committee. I just wanted order. But once I started to see my own ghosts I understood what these religions were all about. They were clubs set up by people like me to stop themselves from going mad. You know what I really think happens? You die. You wait for your number. There's a bit of time to take care of unfinished business. And you pass on. And, as you don't come back, nobody actually knows what you pass on to. But that description has never been acceptable. People want an ending. They don't want to vanish into thin air. So these great religious gurus made some endings up. The more comfortable and happy your ending, the more members signed up and paid their fees. And the kings and emperors started to add rules and regulations to subjugate the commoners and keep them in line. As so they invented hell and told you if you coveted your neighbor's mule you wouldn't even get into the clubhouse at the end of it all. ~ Colin Cotterill

If this were simply a story about the past, it would be appropriate to write, at the conclusion of Acts 28 as at the conclusion of a film, "The End." But since the story is unfinished, it is more appropriate to conclude it with, "RSVP," like an invitation that awaits a response. This is what Luke demands from us: not satisfied curiosity about the past, but a response here and now. RSVP! ~ Justo L. Gonzalez

It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns
...
It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. ~ Carl Jung

As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. ~ Chelsea Manning

New Haven cultivates ... an open gloom that seems happy to acknowledge disrepair and the superfluity of appearance ... I realized that what cramped the town was the weight of unwritten volumes: they scored lines of unfinished writing on every second face that walked the streets ... ~ Sara Suleri

You can't die with an unfinished book. ~ Terry Pratchett

World has already begun. That suffering nourishes grace, and pain and joy are arteries of the same heart - and mourning and dancing are but movements in His unfinished symphony of beauty. Can I believe the gospel, that God is patiently transfiguring all the notes of my life into the song of His Son? What in the world, in all this world, is grace? I can say it certain now: All is grace. I see through the woods of the world: God is always good and I am always loved. God is ~ Ann Voskamp

The future lay in cultivating the scientist in all of us. If science is an unfinished project, the next stage will be about reconnecting and integrating the rigor of scientific method with the richness of direct experience to produce a science that will serve to connect us to one another, ourselves, and the world. ~ Peter M. Senge

Change your thoughts and you change your world. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

I have a preference for rough architecture, real, inexpensive, unfinished. ~ Thom Mayne

The nation was founded and "dedicated," to use Lincoln's language in the "Gettysburg Address," to equality as a "self-evident truth." But this very principle of equality, as Lincoln also noted, was a "proposition." To make it a reality remained "the unfinished work" of Americans. ~ Ronald Takaki

A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it. ~ Harry S. Broudy

The first change is a realization that I am no longer alone. Even when I'm lying in the dark by myself, I now sense other beings hovering near me. It isn't just me living in this house, but unfinished love and my dejection and anger and dead Paulie, and their miraculous presence feels as real as my fingernails digging into my hand. The second change is that I'm not more obsessed with cooking, like the Roman gourmets and their cherished chefs, who wanted to put all things wonderful or special or new or majestic or strange or scary-looking on the table. The cooks back then knew only how to bake or boil, but I understand how a few drops of pomegranate juice can transform a dish. The third change is that with these first two revelations, my sense of taste has become ever more sensitive and sharp, my imagination richer. When I got my ears pierced and walked into the street in the middle of winter, I become one large ear. All sensation and pain were concentrated in my ears. It's that same feeling. Everything about me disappears and I'm only a pink tongue. This is the time to grow into a truly good chef. ~ Kyung-ran Jo

My only one!
In your last letter
"My head aches
my heart is stunned!"
you say.
"If they hang you,
if I lose you;"
you say;
"I can't live!"
You'll live my dearest wife,
like a black smoke in the wind my memory will vanish;
you'll live, the red-haired sister of my heart
at most one year it lasts
in the twentieth century
the grief of death..
Death
a dead body swinging on a rope.
My heart doesn't accept
such a death..
But
be sure that, my love,
if some pitiable gypsy's
hairy black spider like hand
slips the rope
around my neck,
to see the fear in my blue eyes
they'll look in vain
at Nâzım!

And I,
in the twilight of my last morning,
shall see my friends and you,
and carry only the grief
of an unfinished song
to the soil...
My wife!
Good hearted,
golden coloured,
with eyes sweeter than honey, my bee;
why did I write you
that they want to hang me,
the trial is in the first step
and they don't pluck like a turnip
the head of a man.
Come, forget them all.
These are so far away probabilities.
If you have some money
buy me a flannel underwear,
my sciatica is acting up.
And don't forget that always
there should be good thoughts in the mind
of a prisoner's wife. ~ Nâzım Hikmet Ran

Our distance has lived in me like the aftermath of a bad dream-I carry it around, the knowledge that we were once close, that something was lost; it's the lingering sadness of unfinished business. (18) ~ Lauren Fox

American history is not something dead and over. It is always alive,always growing, always unfinished. ~ John F. Kennedy

There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done. ~ John Ruskin

She became a question mark. An unfinished puzzle. An intricate crossword. An impervious shooting star yet to determine her course. ~ Neetha Joseph

Houses were knocked down ... enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped up by great beams of wood ... The yet unfinished and unopened Railway was in progress. ~ Charles Dickens

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It's been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine's bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles. ~ Dominic Smith

Does all this have anything to do with Cameron coming back?"
"Basically."
She didn't put any letters down. Our game had effectively stopped. "I know you might think you want to be with Cameron that way," she said, "but remember it's been such a short time that he's been back, and-"
"It's not that."
"Are you sure?"
"I don't picture us together, like a couple. It's more like..."
"Like a brother?"
"Mom, could you just listen?" She clamped her lips shut. "Not like a brother," I said. "It's almost like nothing would be enough. Being a couple wouldn't be enough. Being like brother and sister wouldn't be enough. It's an endless sense of...I don't know." I could tell her it was killing her not to talk. I sighed. "Go ahead."
"Unfinished business," she said, with a rush of breath. "That's what I see between you two."
"Unfinished business?"
"Yes. And I think it will feel that way until the day you die."
I looked at her to see if she was serious. She was. "Great. ~ Sara Zarr

And when we diverge, it will be impossible for the expendables and the ship's computers on all the ships to know which version of Ram Odin to obey," said Ram. "Therefore I order you and all the other expendables to immediately kill every copy of Ram except me."
"I'm so sorry," said the expendable. "One of the versions of Ram Odin did not include the word 'immediately,' and therefore his order was complete a fraction of a second before all the others. He is the real Ram Odin."
Ram gave a little half smile. "How ironic. By specifying that you should act at once-"
The expendable reached out with both hands, gave Ram's head a twist, and broke his neck. The sentence remained unfinished, but that did not matter, since the person saying it was not the real Ram Odin. ~ Orson Scott Card

If it seems like he's going to die she'll call for me. This is how we talk. In the land of the dying, sentences go unfinished, you know how they're going to end. So ~ Daniel Wallace

But the music did not come again. The tune was left broken, unfinished. And the drawn tightness she could no longer stand. She felt she must do something wild and sudden that never had been done before. She hit herself on the head with her fist, but that did not help any at all. And she began to talk aloud, although at first she paid no attention to her own words and did not know in advance what she would say. ~ Carson McCullers

Spilled Ink

It seemed unfair
And unfinished,
And now it would always be tragic.

Because you kept
Loving them
Even when the story ended.

And there was nowhere
To spill the ink
Of the heartbreak their absence wrote. ~ Liz Newman

Whether I am meant to or not, I challenge assumptions about women. I do make some people uncomfortable, which I'm well aware of, but that's just part of coming to grips with what I believe is still one of the most important pieces of unfinished business in human history - empowering women to be able to stand up for themselves. ~ Hillary Clinton

But all remains unchanged. ~ Franz Kafka

Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and unstrong. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Human being" is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word "yet" to all our assessments of ourselves and each other . . . If life is process, all judgments are provisional, we can't judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over . . .

In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process . . .

It is taken me somewhat longer to recognize that a diagnosis is simply another form of judgment. Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is.

Much in the concept of diagnosis and cure is about fixing, and the narrow-bore focus on fixing people's problems can lead to denial of the power of their process. Years ago, I took full credit when people became well; their recovery was testimony to my skill and knowledge as a physician. I never recognized that without their biological, emotional, and spiritual process which could respond to my interventions, nothing could have changed at all. All the time I thought I was repairing, I was collaborating. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen

On the TV a politician Attila recognised was speaking. He was a heavyweight man wearing a suit that looked like a huge black bag. His hair was parted low on one side from where the mass of it surged forward lika an ocean braker onto the beach of his forehead where it was cast backwards onto the crown of his head, finally spilling over the back of his collar. That he was vexed was evidenced by the way he held up his hand, thumb and forefinger formed into the shape of an O which almost exactly mirrored the shape of his mouth; his face seemed to pulsate with fury. (...) Attila strained to listen. He had seen the politician on television before, had been compelled by his speech patterns, marked by half-sentences, the man left one thought unfinished as he rushed on to the next, he talked about himself in the third person. He raged, he shouted. All that, plus the laquered hair. Many politicians were narcissists, it came with the territory, the self-belief required. Narcissists weren't so bad, most great artists were narcissists too. This man though, in Attila's professional opinion, displayed many of the traits of hypomania. ~ Aminatta Forna

What's your unfinished business ?"
"I wanted to matter ~ Kim Fielding

In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. ~ Paulette Jiles

You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of raindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You're just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time. ~ Werner Herzog

There is a secret and wholesome conviction in the heart of every man or woman who has written a book that it should be no easy matter for an intelligent reader to lay down that book unfinished. There is a pardonable impression among reviewers that half an hour in its company is sufficient. ~ Agnes Repplier

Three years later, a new girl sits cross-legged on your bed.
She tastes like a different flavor of bubblegum than you are used to.
She opens up a book that you had to read in high school, and a folded picture of us falls out of chapter three.
Now there are two unfinished stories resting in her lap.
Inevitably, she asks, and you tell her.

You say: I dated her a while back.
You don't say: Sometimes, when I'm holding you, I imagine the smell of her vanilla perfume.

You say: She was younger than me.
You don't say: The sixteen summers in her bones warmed the eighteen winters my skin had weathered.

You say: It's nothing now.
You don't say: But it was everything then. ~ Auriel H.

The collective sign of relief heaved on V-J Day ought to have inspired Hollywood to release a flood of "happily ever after" films. But some victors didn't feel too good about their spoils. They'd seen too much by then. Too much warfare, too much poverty, too much greed, all in the service of rapacious progress. A bundle of unfinished business lingered from the Depression - nagging questions about ingrained venality, mean human nature, and the way unchecked urban growth threw society dangerously out of whack. Writers and directors responded by delivering gritty, bitter dramas that slapped our romantic illusions in the face and put the boot to the throat of the smug bourgeoisie. Still, plenty of us took it - and liked it. ~ Eddie Muller

High overhead, in the reflected glare of arc lamps, one of the unfinished Fuller domes shut out two thirds of the salmon-pink evening sky, its ragged edge like broken gray honeycomb. The Sprawl's patchwork of domes tended to generate inadvertent microclimates; there were areas of a few city blocks where a fine drizzle of condensation fell continually from the soot-stained geodesics, and sections of high dome famous for displays of static-discharge, a peculiarly urban variety of lightning. ~ William Gibson

I've lived a life of unfinished things. ~ Dorothy Kunhardt

She has that voraciousness about children. She swoops in on them. Even I, in public was a beloved child. She'd parade me into town, smiling and teasing me, tickling me as she spoke with people on the sidewalks. When we got home, she'd trail off to her room like an unfinished sentence, and I would sit outside with my face pressed against her door, and replay the day in my head, searching for clues to what I had done to displease her.

I have one memory that catches in me like a nasty clump of blood. Marian was dead about two years, and my mother had a cluster of friends come over for afternoon drinks. For hours, the child was cooed over, smothered with red lipstick kisses, tidied up with tissues, then lipstick smacked again. I was suppose to be reading in my room, but I sat at the top of the stairs watching.

My mother finally was handed the baby, and she cuddled it ferociously. Oh, how, wonderful it is to hold a baby again! Adora jiggled it on her knee, walked it around the rooms, whispered to it, and I looked down from above like a spiteful little god, the back of my hand placed against my face, imagining how it felt to be cheek to cheek with my mother. ~ Gillian Flynn

Whether you are a writer or an actor or a stage manager, you are trying to express the complications of life through a shared enterprise. That's what theatre was, always. And live performance shares that with an audience in a specific compact: the play is unfinished unless it has an audience, and they are as important as everyone else. ~ Lee Hall

For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit. Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take a ship to India and see a naked man spearing a fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency - that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed myself as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole. ~ Virginia Woolf

It was the us they created whenever they were together - that had made all of this both natural and inevitable. She couldn't help thinking that the story between them was somehow unfinished; that both of them were waiting to write the ending. ~ Nicholas Sparks

A blue sky, a jostling wind, a murky dream, a smiling moon, and a cup of coffee with a song unfinished in those eyes twinkling away a story untold. ~ Debatrayee Banerjee

I'm unfinished business and business hours are over ~ Renee Ruin

I try not to bring in anything I don't love looking at. It's about restaint ... There is something about an unfinished quality that leaves within you that sense of possibility. ~ Caio Fonseca

You must have traveled all night," she heard herself say.
"I had to come back early." She felt his lips brush her tumbled hair. "I left some things unfinished. But I had a feeling you might need me. Tell me what's happened, sweetheart."
Amelia opened her mouth to answer, but to her mortification, the only sound she could make was a sort of miserable croak. Her self-control shattered. She shook her head and choked on more sobs, and the more she tried to stop them, the worse they became.
Cam gripped her firmly, deeply, into his embrace. The appalling storm of tears didn't seem to bother him at all. He took one of Amelia's hands and flattened it against his heart, until she could feel the strong, steady beat. In a world that was disintegrating around her, he was solid and real. "It's all right," she heard him murmur. "I'm here."
Alarmed by her own lack of self-discipline, Amelia made a wobbly attempt to stand on her own, but he only hugged her more closely. "No, don't pull away. I've got you." He cuddled her shaking form against his chest. Noticing Poppy's awkward retreat, Cam sent her a reassuring smile. "Don't worry, little sister."
"Amelia hardly ever cries," Poppy said.
"She's fine." Cam ran his hand along Amelia's spine in soothing strokes. "She just needs…"
As he paused, Poppy said, "A shoulder to lean on."
"Yes." He drew Amelia to the stairs, and gestured for Poppy to sit beside them.
Cradling Amelia on his lap, Cam fo ~ Lisa Kleypas

Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character... The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future...Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness. ~ Virginia Woolf

I just do. That's why it's love - it's unconditional. Whether you commit a mistake or a hundred, I would still love you. They say the most romantic kind of love is the unfinished kind. The kind that will forever burn and mark your soul - you've bewitched me, body and soul. I love you - and whether you do or don't feel the same, my love is withstanding and unequivocal. ~ Pamela Ann

Never rest on your laurels. Never quit. Never stop working to make the world a better place. That's our unfinished business. ~ Hilary Clinton

Everything is unfinished - our whole lives. ~ Lily Anderson

When I get on a roll with something, it's really hard for me to put it down unfinished. ~ Taylor Swift

morigu the desacration and morigu the dead great books but series is unfinished ~ Mark C. Perry

It's not even about being negative. It's just being unsettled, unsatisfied, unfinished. ~ Kevin Spacey

Four p.m. is like a basement. Wholly innocent in theory. But if you really think about a basement, it is cement poured over restless earth. It has smelly, unfinished spaces, and wooden beams that cast too-sharp shadows. It is something that says almost, but not quite. Four p.m. feels that way, too. Almost, but not quite afternoon anymore. Almost, but not quite evening yet. And it is the way of magic and nightmares to choose those almost-but-not-quite moments and wait. ~ Roshani Chokshi

For my own good, I want to hang out with people who want to find out what it would be like to live in such a way as to leave no unspoken words, no unfinished business; I want to be with people who are hungry for the truth, who want to spend time learning and sharing what they have learned rather than defending their images or reputations. ~ Brad Blanton

Humanity is regarded as unfinished, incomplete, imperfect. We have the possibility of completing ourselves, perfecting ourselves, and all that is necessary for this lies in us. ~ Maurice Nicoll

There's no poetry in me, Reginleit. No fine words." He stared down at her, his gaze seeming to consume her. "I come to you as a man unfinished. ~ Kresley Cole

You're through running from that sh*t. I get it now, I don't like it, but I get it. You still have unfinished business that's why they're always on your mind. I hope you'll get to the point where you stop running and start fighting back. ~ Jordan Silver

One way to remain
unfinished is to stop.
the other is to go on. ~ Laura Moriarty

You don't have INSOMNIA.
You're a writer with an unfinished book! ~ T.N. Suarez