Incomplete Stories Quotes

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

There's no such thing as complete when it comes to stories. Stories are infinite. They are as infinite as worlds.

Without our stories we are incomplete.

I always knew there was no one who is going to accept my flaws and understand my brokenness.And i knew it very well that nobody would hold my hand when the wind of darkness overcome my life so i just pushed them,i pushed them all away.

I'll tell you a secret about storytelling. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty... were not perfect in the beginning. It's only a happy ending on the last page, right? If the princess had everything from the beginning, there wouldn't be a story. Anyone who is imperfect or incomplete can become the main character in the story.

Nico had once read a story from Plato, who claimed that in the ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half—man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their lives searching for their other halves.

I will never be at ease while watching the sunset, knowing our stories will never end with the same words. All sunsets have their own story, it is just that ours will always fall incomplete.

This isn't how prophecies work... This isn't how stories unfold... Incompletely.

I realized that I'm lonely without her and she's incomplete without me. There will be no end to our love story..

Because we are compelled to make stories, we are often compelled to take incomplete stories and run with them.

It is when darkness prevails that I sit by the window to look past all those electricity-free houses, smell the sweet scent of a calm Gazan night, feel the fresh air going straight to my heart, and think of you, of me, of Palestine, of the crack, of the blank wall, of you, of Mama, of you, of my history class, of you, of God, of Palestine—of our incomplete story.

Loving you is no more a beautiful memory, but now just a pain, I cry and weep every time I walk down the memory lane, Your love always completed me in every sense as a whole, But now it’s just emptiness and sorrow in my heart that drains, Of all the people in the world, you choose me to be hurt, Of all the hearts in the world, you choose mine to break… Why did you leave me I ask myself every morning and dawn? Why my love was incomplete tell me why you were gone? A silence surrounds my heart and fills it again with despair, Oh this pain is just too much, and the damage beyond repair, Please come back baby, just come back and bring that old smile, Or just come to see me every once in a while, So my heart no more bleeds, and no more my soul aches, So I can be peaceful after my death, in my ashes and burnt flakes…

The tales would be imperfect; the legends would be incomplete. And each and every one of us standing in the garden that night would take an entire universe of stories with us when we died, the accounts of every small moment that did not seem grand enough to storytellers, which would disappear in smoke when our bodies were burned.

When you can release on your ego long enough to view your perceptions as incomplete or misleading, it gives you the freedom to imagine new and potentially more useful ways of looking at the world.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche has said, “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken—Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch—sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war. The greyhound is

Do you ever feel lost?” The question hangs between us, intimate, awkward only on my end. He doesn’t scoff as Tactus and Fitchner would, or scratch his balls like Sevro, or chuckle like Cassius might have, or purr as Victra would. I’m not sure what Mustang might have done. But Roque, despite his Color and all the things that make him different, slowly slides a marker into the book and sets it on the nightstand beside the four-poster, taking his time and allowing an answer to evolve between us. Movements thoughtful and organic, like Dancer’s were before he died. There’s a stillness in him, vast and majestic, the same stillness I remember in my father. “Quinn once told me a story.” He waits for me to moan a grievance at the mention of a story, and when I don’t, his tone sinks into deeper gravity. “Once, in the days of Old Earth, there were two pigeons who were greatly in love. In those days, they raised such animals to carry messages across great distances. These two were born in the same cage, raised by the same man, and sold on the same day to different men on the eve of a great war. “The pigeons suffered apart from each other, each incomplete without their lover. Far and wide their masters took them, and the pigeons feared they would never again find each other, for they began to see how vast the world was, and how terrible the things in it. For months and months, they carried messages for their masters, flying over battle lines, through the air over men who killed one another for land. When the war ended, the pigeons were set free by their masters. But neither knew where to go, neither knew what to do, so each flew home. And there they found each other again, as they were always destined to return home and find, instead of the past, their future.

As the author, I construct an artifact out of words, but the words are meaningless until they're animated by the consciousness of the reader. The story is co-told by the author and the reader, and every story is incomplete until a reader comes along and interprets it.

Time matters most when decisions are irreversible. And yet many irreversible decisions must be made on the basis of incomplete information.

Maybe stories and memories are destined to be incomplete...

We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, unredemptive, false, or incomplete God if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, the wholeness, the joy of a loving God.

Here is something you have to understand about stories: They point you in the right direction but they can't take you all the way there. Stories are crescent moons; they glimmer in the night sky, but they are most exquisite in their incomplete state. Because people crave the beauty of not-knowing, the excitement of suggestion, and the sweet tragedy of mystery.

Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones.

Seated across is a silent affair looking into my eyes; blurring the loud scenery. An incapable dream, an unimagined union-I whisper. Then you close your eyes and your soul yells my name. I cradle your peace back-with a sigh and kiss your thought away. Because we are an incomplete pair of Romeo and Juliet left alive by the Montagues and the Capulets; killed by the distance of the sun and the moon.

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

I may have wept that any should have died Or missed their chance, or not have been their best, Or been their riches, fame, or love denied; On me as much as any is the jest. I take my incompleteness with the rest. God bless himself can no one else be blessed I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori. And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

When we get lost in our stories, we lose touch with our actual experience. Leaning into the future, or rehashing the past, we leave the living experience of the immediate moment. Our trance deepens as we move through the day driven by “I have to do more to be okay” or “I am incomplete; I need more to be happy.” These “mantras” reinforce the trance-belief that our life should be different from what it is.

There is a delightful story which tells of Eostre finding an injured bird on the ground and, in order to save its life, she transformed it into a hare. The transformation however was incomplete and, although the bird looked like a hare, it still retained the ability to lay eggs. Regardless of this slight mishap, the hare was so grateful for the goddess saving her life that on Eostre’s festival the hare would lay eggs, decorate them and leave them as a token of thanks. In Germany today, many young children still believe that their Easter eggs are laid and delivered by the Easter hare.

He had no document but his memory; the training he had acquired with each added hexameter gave him a discipline unsuspected by those who set down and forget temporary, incomplete paragraphs. He was not working for posterity or even for God, whose literary tastes were unknown to him. Meticulously, motionlessly, secretly, he wrought in time his lofty, invisible labyrinth. He worked the third act over twice. He eliminated certain symbols as over-obvious, such as the repeated striking of the clock, the music. Nothing hurried him. He omitted, he condensed, he amplified. In certain instances he came back to the original version. He came to feel affection for the courtyard, the barracks; one of the faces before him modified his conception of Roemerstadt's character. He discovered that the wearying cacophonies that bothered Flaubert so much are mere visual superstitions, weakness and limitation of the written word, not the spoken...He concluded his drama. He had only the problem of a single phrase. He found it. The drop of water slid down his cheek. He opened his mouth in a maddened cry, moved his face, dropped under the quadruple blast.

The generations of lives, experiences, and voices of marginalized and silenced Americans offer an array of diverse interpretations of U.S. history that have largely gone unheard, unacknowledged, and unrewarded. Without their perspectives, we are presented with an incomplete and incongruent story that is at best a disservice to the historical record and at worst a means of maintaining an unjust status quo.

Quinn once told me a story.” He waits for me to moan a grievance at the mention of a story, and when I don’t, his tone sinks into deeper gravity. “Once, in the days of Old Earth, there were two pigeons who were greatly in love. In those days, they raised such animals to carry messages across great distances. These two were born in the same cage, raised by the same man, and sold on the same day to different men on the eve of a great war. “The pigeons suffered apart from each other, each incomplete without their lover. Far and wide their masters took them, and the pigeons feared they would never again find each other, for they began to see how vast the world was, and how terrible the things in it. For months and months, they carried messages for their masters, flying over battle lines, through the air over men who killed one another for land. When the war ended, the pigeons were set free by their masters. But neither knew where to go, neither knew what to do, so each flew home. And there they found each other again, as they were always destined to return home and find, instead of the past, their future.” He folds his hands gently, a teacher arriving at his point. “So do I feel lost? Always. When Lea died at the Institute …” His lips slip gently downward. “… I was in a dark woods, blind and lost as Dante before Virgil. But Quinn helped me. Her voice calling me out of misery. She became my home. As she puts it, ‘Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.’ ” He grasps the top of my hand. “Find your home, Darrow. It may not be in the past. But find it, and you’ll never be lost again.

Our imaginings (if they are ours) should be based in our own lives and experiences, all our memories. But all of our memories include the tales we were told as children, all the myths, all the fairy tales, all the stories. Without our stories we are incomplete.

Some love stories remains incomplete and then we complete them by giving a form of novel

You will always be an unfinished part of me.

The past is written but incomplete, each story a footprint amongst countless feet. The truth is revealed but only a grain, a speck of sand amongst a vast desert plain.

Some stories are incomplete but they are beautiful...

The days are like an ocean and nights are like some islands, its an incomplete story and incomplete goodbye, i just hope it doesn't end like that forever.

Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader. The reader is, after all, a kind of silent partner in this whole business of writing, and a work of fiction is surely incomplete if it is never read. The reader is, in fact, the writer's only unrelenting, genuine enemy. He has everything on his side; all he has to do, after all, is shut his eyes, and any work of fiction becomes meaningless. Moreover, a reader has an advantage over a beginning writer in not being a beginning reader; before he takes up a story to read it, he can be presumed to have read everything from Shakespeare to Jack Kerouac. No matter whether he reads a story in manuscript as a great personal favor, or opens a magazine, or—kindest of all—goes into a bookstore and pays good money for a book, he is still an enemy to be defeated with any kind of dirty fighting that comes to the writer's mind.

Nico had once read a story from Plato, who claimed that in the ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half—man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent

Enjoying the world just as it is. Understanding that many things are incomplete. Allowing it to be so. One day there will come a time in your life when you know how everything has ended, but, unfortunately, that will be the day you die. On that day, even if you are waiting for an answer to something, you will know how that story ended: you died before learning. But you don’t want this to be the day you die. Nobody does. Those are your two choices. You can be alive and wondering, or you can die and know how everything turned out. Put that way, doesn’t the living option sound better?

Because a new love affair always gives hope, the irrational mortal loneliness is always crowned, that thing I saw (that horror of a snake emptiness) when I took the deep iodine deathbreath on the Big Sur beach is now justified and hosannah'd and raised up like a sacred urn to Heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love- don't let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that nobody in the world even ever dares to write the true story of lovem it's awful, we're stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama- lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow- the secret underground truth of mad desire hiding under fenders under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors and painted tongue in cheek by artists, agh, just listen to Tristan und Isolde by Wagner and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under fall leaves.

You are an extraordinary woman. You have a purpose in this world, and hiding behind a fictional story that you’re broken or incomplete is not it. The world needs you. It needs that very special something you knew you had when you were a little girl.

Before I start a film or a play, I try to build a world in my mind. An imaginative world which the character lives in; and I create that with novels, with painting, with music, with films. I try and understand tone. Tone is so important. Is this a thriller, is this a Gothic romance, is this an action film, is this a love story? Then, once I understand that, I just jump into it. This might be like an incomplete way of describing it, but it's like I build a swimming pool, then I just dive in. Do you know what I mean?

Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries. The natural lifespan of wild chickens is about seven to twelve years, and of cattle about twenty to twenty-five years. In the wild, most chickens and cattle died long before that, but they still had a fair chance of living for a respectable number of years. In contrast, the vast majority of domesticated chickens and cattle are slaughtered at the age of between a few weeks and a few months, because this has always been the optimal slaughtering age from an economic perspective. (Why keep feeding a cock for three years if it has already reached its maximum weight after three months?) Egg-laying hens, dairy cows and draught animals are sometimes allowed to live for many years. But the price is subjugation to a way of life completely alien to their urges and desires. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that bulls prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the company of other bulls and cows rather than pulling carts and ploughshares under the yoke of a whip-wielding ape. In order for humans to turn bulls, horses, donkeys and camels into obedient draught animals, their natural instincts and social ties had to be broken, their aggression and sexuality contained, and their freedom of movement curtailed. Farmers developed techniques such as locking animals inside pens and cages, bridling them in harnesses and leashes, training them with whips and cattle prods, and mutilating them. The process of taming almost always involves the castration of males. This restrains male aggression and enables humans selectively to control the herd’s procreation.

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

How naive Lore had been, despite being the daughter of a father no one spoke of, despite the strange, incomplete conversations at her mother’s deathbed; how again and again she was caught up short by the discovery that other people had stories they didn’t tell, or told stories that weren’t entirely true. How mostly you got odd chunks torn from the whole, impossible truly to understand in their damaged form.

I love the unanswered question, the unresolved story, the unclimbed mountain, the tender shard of an incomplete dream. Most of the time. But is it mandatory for a writer to be ambiguous about everything? Isn't it true that there have been fearful episodes in human history when prudence and discretion would have just been euphemisms for pusillanimity? When caution was actually cowardice? When sophistication was disguised decadence? When circumspection was really a kind of espousal? Isn't it true, or at least theoretically possible, that there are times in the life of a people or a nation when the political climate demands that we—even the most sophisticated of us—overtly take sides? I think such times are upon us.

Just as the towering myth of Abraham Lincoln—honest backwoods lawyer, spinner of yarns, righter of wrongs—tells only part of the truth, so, too, is the myth of America woefully incomplete. The country that Ronald Reagan once called “a shining city upon a hill” has, in fact, been tangled up in darkness since before she was born. Millions of souls have graced the American stage over the centuries, played parts both great and small, and made their final exits. But of all the souls who witnessed America’s birth and growth, who fought in her finest hours, and who had a hand in her hidden history, only one soul remains to tell the whole truth. What follows is the story of Henry Sturges. What follows is the story of an American life.

Sometimes women’s attraction to true crime is dismissed as trashy and voyeuristic (because women are vapid!). Sometimes it is unquestioningly celebrated as feminist (because if women like something, then it must be feminist!). And some argue that women read about serial killers to avoid becoming victims. This is the most flattering theory—and also, it seemed to me, the most incomplete. By presuming that women’s dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts are drained of their menace. True crime wasn’t something we women at CrimeCon were consuming begrudgingly, for our own good. We found pleasure in these bleak accounts of kidnappings and assaults and torture chambers, and you could tell by how often we fell back on the language of appetite, of bingeing, of obsession. A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.

The moral and medical lessons from this story are even more relevant today. Medicine is in the midst of a vast reorganization of fundamental principles. Most of our models of illness are hybrid models; past knowledge is mishmashed with present knowledge. These hybrid models produce the illusion of a systematic understanding of a disease—but the understanding is, in fact, incomplete. Everything seems to work spectacularly, until one planet begins to move backward on the horizon. We have invented many rules to understand normalcy—but we still lack a deeper, more unified understanding of physiology and pathology.

Breaking news, for example, is almost always much lower quality than the reporting that’s possible once an event has occurred and journalists have had time to process it. A well-known journalist recently told me that following a breaking story on Twitter gives him the sense that he’s receiving lots of information, but that in his experience, waiting until the next morning to read the article about the story in the Washington Post almost always leaves him more informed. Unless you’re a breaking news reporter, it’s usually counterproductive to expose yourself to the fire hose of incomplete, redundant, and often contradictory information that spews through the internet in response to noteworthy events.

The problem with stereotypes is not because they are untrue, its because they are incomplete; they make one story, the only story

But experience can be a difficult teacher, and it taught me that this story of economic insecurity is, at best, incomplete.

The process of kundalini awakening or its understanding is incomplete without an intimate knowledge of the three knots that bind each one of us.

It is like breathing to us, and to ignore math in this story would be akin to listening to Frank Zappa without ever having taken hallucinogens, an incomplete experience.

This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it's incomplete, because stories like this don't have an ending.

As we read the Bible, we see that God's role is not that of a scientist managing robots. Neither is God a frustrated artist who left an incomplete work and chose to start an altogether different one. Throughout the biblical testimonies, God is an involved character who loves relentlessly, judges fairly, and joins wholly in ongoing relationship with creation. The Bible itself has a "to be continued" ending, and God is to be understood as continuing in the action of the drama. God still partners with people today in an ongoing story of renewal.

Gap... A gesture, incomplete! Something unfinished, Left. A trust of heart, Faith! Hope... A few Stories yet to be completed! Perhaps. A side yet to be unfolded, Filled, completed... Finished!

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions.

And since the dreaming psyche compensates for, among other things, that which the ego will not or cannot acknowledge, a woman’s dreams during such a struggle will be filled, compensatorily, with chases, dead ends, cars that will not start, incomplete pregnancies, and other symbols which image life not going forward. In her guts a woman knows there is a deadliness in being the too-sweet self for too long.

Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you're at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.

Suddenly, Walter was aware of all the things he did not know. There were hundreds--thousands--of books in the world, and he had read only a handful of them. One day he would die, a myriad of books unread, his knowledge of the world incomplete.

It wasn’t that Europe wasn’t beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn’t mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else’s romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

In other words, don't be reductive. Often, writers will rush to an ending that completes, or sums up, or reduces their story as opposed to moving to a place where it goes to something they may not understand and that may be incomplete but is more honest. That rush doesn't do a service to anyone. It doesn't do a service to the work, and it doesn't do a service to the reader. We know that things are complex; we want things to be complex so that, together, we can look deeply into the layers of an open system.

We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken, sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war.

This is the true story of my life, as told by a complete liar (me). While that sounds like an honest statement, it’s also a lie. I just can’t help myself. Unless I’m helping myself to seconds at dinner. You see, I can’t possibly be a complete liar, because I’m a rather incomplete person. I look complete on the outside—two arms, legs, ears, eyes, etc—but on the inside I feel half empty at times. If I were a glass of water, I’d make myself thirstier for more than I could supply. I thirst for love like a straw in the Sahara. I hunger for your body like a cannibal in the mountains. Wait, that last bit wasn’t true. I should have said cannibal on a deserted island.

My favorite stories are the ones about love. Because love never ends up the way we expect. Love is the most uncertain story we’ll ever know. No one love story exists, only those we’re told from a young age: man, woman and happily ever after. Forever. But forever and happy are half-baked concepts that make us feel incomplete, even alone.

So how does the massively complicated brain, with its eighty-six billion neurons, get built from such a small recipe book? The answer pivots on a clever strategy implemented by the genome: build incompletely and let world experience refine. Thus, for humans at birth, the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it.

My love isn’t destroying me. It’s giving me strength. When two people love each other, that love can cripple you, the other person can cripple you because that love is divided between two persons. My love isn’t unrequited either. Unrequited love is where no one holds power to destroy you but yourself. Mine is incomplete, and there’s a difference. An incomplete love holds on to hope until the very end.

Similar stories are told about the other great goddesses—Inana, Ishtar and Isis—who search for the dead god and bring new life to the soil. The victory of Anat, however, must be perpetuated year after year in ritual celebration. Later—we are not sure how, since our sources are incomplete—Baal is brought back to life and restored to Anat. This apotheosis of wholeness and harmony, symbolized by the union of the sexes, was celebrated by means of ritual sex in ancient Canaan. By imitating the gods in this way, men and women would share their struggle against sterility and ensure the creativity and fertility of the world. The death of a god, the quest of the goddess and the triumphant return to the divine sphere were constant religious themes in many cultures and would recur in the very different religion of the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Although incomplete, the story of Templer’s London adventure—to be recapitulated on countless future occasions—had sufficiently amplified the incident for its significance to be inescapably clear to Stringham and myself. This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if sounds of far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before.

Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don’t really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs to satisfy just two conditions: first, it must give me some role to play. A New Guinean tribesman is unlikely to believe in Zionism or in Serbian nationalism, because these stories don’t care at all about New Guinea and its people. Like movie stars, humans like only those scripts that reserve an important role for them. Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that ‘something bigger’. If the meaning of my life is to help the proletariat or the Polish nation, what exactly gives meaning to the proletariat or to the Polish nation? There is a story of a man who claimed that the world is kept in place by resting on the back of a huge elephant. When asked what the elephant stands on, he replied “that it stands on the back of a large turtle. And the turtle? On the back of an even bigger turtle. And that bigger turtle? The man snapped and said: ‘Don’t bother about it. From there onwards it’s turtles all the way down.

Nico had once read a story from Plato, who claimed that in the ancient times, all humans and been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half—man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their lives searching for their other halves. And where does that leave me? Nico wondered. It wasn't his favourite story.

The Ashanti conquered forests to build an empire, but they knew nature was from whence they came and to nature they would return. They would tame the land, but they would know when Asase Yaa needed her rest. Their most sacred duty was to ensure harmony and peace between the community, the earth, and the ancestors; to ensure justice. To the community, the Ashanti pledged loyalty. To the earth and the ancestors, they made sacrifices -- to each their due. But harmony is a fragile thing, and so is justice. They bend and break easily. We bend and break them with greed, with violence, with lies and obscurations. The people sold into slavery are modern-day Ghanaians' ancestors too. Their backs and hearts broke under whip and weight. The incomplete story Ghana tells about slavery is a breach. Ashanti culture was breached by colonization. My family broke before and I knew it might break again. The earth broke from the force of a meteoroid, which sent shock waves in every direction.

Grateful was the teacher rescued by Elwood’s contributions when the classroom fell drowsy with the afternoon heat and he offered up Archimedes or Amsterdam at the key moment. The boy had one usable volume of Fisher’s Universal Encyclopedia, so he used it, what else could he do? Better than nothing. Skipping around, wearing it down, revisiting his favorite parts as if it were one of his adventure tales. As a story, the encyclopedia was disjointed and incomplete, but still exciting in its own right. Elwood filled his notebook with the good parts, definitions and etymology. Later he’d find this scrap-rummaging pathetic.

All stories are incomplete. Yet in order to construct a viable identity for myself and give meaning to my life, I don't really need a complete story devoid of blind spots and internal contradictions. To give meaning to my life, a story needs t justify just two conditions. First, it must give me some role to play. [....] Second, whereas a good story need not extend to infinity, it must extend beyond my horizons. The story provides me with an identity and gives meaning to my life by embedding me within something bigger than myself. But there is always a danger that I might start wondering what gives meaning to that "something bigger".

Every time I think I have it figured out - this is how God acts, this is who God is, this is what God will do, this is what God expects - that reorienting, bracing, dangerous Love becomes and unbecomes again. And so I have been made and remade and unmade over and over again in response to the Ancient One. We place a lot of emphasis in our culture on "right learning," but there is something to be said for the value of "right unlearning" and "right relearning." We have to be committed to unlearning the unhelpful, broken, unredemptive, false, or incomplete God if we want to have space to relearn the goodness, the wholeness, the joy of a loving God.

From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.

Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness. Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived.

Why didn’t God want them to build the Tower of Babel?” I said. “Why did He make it so everybody couldn’t understand each other?” “You know I don’t believe in God.” “I know.” “Probably there was just a ziggurat, you know what a ziggurat is? Over in Mesopotamia. Maybe it was in ruins. Maybe it was only halfway built, left unfinished. And they made up a story to explain what happened to it, why it looked incomplete.” “Oh.” “You understand what I’m saying?” I understood: Everything got ruined and nothing was ever finished. The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse. That was proverbial.

My lover is dead. And they think I killed him. I'm running rogue. Hell bent on both revenge and redemption. Whatever it takes, I'm going to finish a job that began nine months ago. An unauthorized assignment that turned horribly, devastatingly wrong. My miscalculation. My fault. My heart left shattered into incomplete pieces which will never wholly fit back together again. But first I have to outsmart my former organization and the hired killer they've sent after me; a ghost from my past who knows my every move, who’s been inside my head, my heart, my dreams and memories: Jaxson. I'm the traitor, Kylie. The rogue mercenary, Jaxon's newest assignment. And this is our love story.

At times I think of the subject matter of the book to be written as of something that already exists: thoughts already thought, dialogue already spoken, stories already happened, places and settings seen; the book should be simply the equivalent of the unwritten world translated into writing. At other times, on the contrary, I seem to understand that between the book to be written and things that already exist there can be only a kind of complementary relationship: the book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.

There is yet another reason why peer-oriented kids are insatiable. In order to reach the turning point, a child must not only be fulfilled, but this fulfillment must sink in. It has to register somehow in the child's brain that the longing for closeness and connectedness is being met. This registration is not cognitive or even conscious, but deeply emotional. It is emotion that moves the child and shifts the energy from one developmental agenda to another, from attachment to individuation. The problem is that, for fulfillment to sink in, the child must be able to feel deeply and vulnerably — an experience most peer-oriented kids will be defended against. Peer-oriented children cannot permit themselves to feel their vulnerability. It may seem strange that feelings of fulfillment would require openness to feelings of vulnerability. There is no hurt or pain in fulfillment — quite the opposite. Yet there is an underlying emotional logic to this phenomenon. For the child to feel full he must first feel empty, to feel helped the child must first feel in need of help, to feel complete he must have felt incomplete. To experience the joy of reunion one must first experience the ache of loss, to be comforted one must first have felt hurt. Satiation may be a very pleasant experience, but the prerequisite is to be able to feel vulnerability. When a child loses the ability to feel her attachment voids, the child also loses the ability to feel nurtured and fulfilled. One of the first things I check for in my assessment of children is the existence of feelings of missing and loss. It is indicative of emotional health for children to be able to sense what is missing and to know what the emptiness is about. As soon as they are able to articulate, they should be able to say things like “I miss daddy,” “It hurt me that grandma didn't notice me,” “It didn't seem like you were interested in my story,” “I don't think so and so likes me.” Many children today are too defended, too emotionally closed, to experience such vulnerable emotions. Children are affected by what is missing whether they feel it or not, but only when they can feel and know what is missing can they be released from their pursuit of attachment. Parents of such children are not able to take them to the turning point or bring them to a place of rest. If a child becomes defended against vulnerability as a result of peer orientation, he is made insatiable in relation to the parents as well. That is the tragedy of peer orientation — it renders our love and affection so useless and unfulfilling. For children who are insatiable, nothing is ever enough. No matter what one does, how much one tries to make things work, how much attention and approval is given, the turning point is never reached. For parents this is extremely discouraging and exhausting. Nothing is as satisfying to a parent as the sense of being the source of fulfillment for a child. Millions of parents are cheated of such an experience because their children are either looking elsewhere for nurturance or are too defended against vulnerability to be capable of satiation. Insatiability keeps our children stuck in first gear developmentally, stuck in immaturity, unable to transcend basic instincts. They are thwarted from ever finding rest and remain ever dependent on someone or something outside themselves for satisfaction. Neither the discipline imposed by parents nor the love felt by them can cure this condition. The only hope is to bring children back into the attachment fold where they belong and then soften them up to where our love can actually penetrate and nurture.

They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts. NOTES ON METHODOLOGY I began this work because of what I saw as incomplete perceptions, outside of scholarly circles, of what the Great Migration was and how and why it happened, particularly through the eyes of those who experienced it. Because it was so unwieldy and lasted for so long, the movement did not appear to rise to the level of public consciousness that, by any measure, it seemed to deserve. The first question, in my view, had to do with its time frame: what was it, and when precisely did it occur? The Great Migration is often described as a jobs-driven, World War I movement, despite decades of demographic evidence and real-world indicators that it not only continued well into the 1960s but gathered steam with each decade, not ending until the social, political, and economic reasons for the Migration began truly to be addressed in the South in the dragged-out, belated response to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second question had to do with where it occurred. The migration from Mississippi to Chicago has been the subject of the most research through the years and has dominated discussion of the phenomenon, in part because of the sheer size of the black influx there and because of the great scholarly interest taken in it by a cadre of social scientists working in Chicago at the start of the Migration. However, from my years as a national correspondent at The New York Times and my early

Q:Alaska wasn't introduced as fully as the other characters even though the book largely centres around the effect she had on people (like the Colonel). Is that intentional? A: The first time Pudge and Alaska have a real conversation , she's sitting next to him in the dark and he can't really see her. And throughout the story, there are times when he's looking at her without seeing her, or there's something between them that prevents him from seeing her whole face, or he only sees the back of her head, etc., etc., etc. That was all meant to indicate how incompletly he sees Alaska, something she mentions to him again and again. But in all his fascination with her, he can't help but romanticise her, which makes it difficult for him to understand the reality and seriousness of her pain.

Commitment is what transforms a dream into reality. One percent or ninety-nine percent complete are both incomplete. Wanting is wishing or dreaming. Deciding is the willingness to do whatever it takes to make your wishes and dreams come true. Pondering on what you are going to do actually sucks up more time and energy than going out there and doing it. If you’re planted in an environment with depleted soil loaded with weeds, your conditions must change in order for you grow and thrive. As you change your circle of influence, your thinking changes, and ultimately your world changes too. When you are too busy trying to outshine others, you miss out on your own inner spark. If your focus is on competing with others, you cannot complete you. Perfection is a myth, a misconception, and just an opinion. A well-tailored business suit might look perfect to a banker, but deemed to be dreadful to a heavy metal rocker. Going out of your comfort zone might be gut-wrenching, but dying with the music still inside is even more painful. Stagnation drains your energy and slowly sucks the life out of you. When you declutter your mental space, just like clearing out physical space, you find valuables you had long forgotten about. Keeping emotional toxin in your head is like fertilizing unwanted weeds. Positivity is your weed killer. Turn it around, and let that poison fuel your passion, just like farmers using manure to fertilize plants. Like eating, going to the bathroom, or exercising, self-transformation cannot be delegated. I was a sunflower trying to survive and grow in a stinky muddy swamp, but instead being strangled by a bunch of weeds.

Sleepwalking is a parasomnia, a strange behavior that occurs during sleep. Over the years, sleep experts have identified two main stages of sleep by recording brain waves—rapid eye movement (REM) and non–rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. Sleepwalking usually occurs after an abrupt and incomplete spontaneous arousal from the non-REM sleep that occurs in the first couple of hours of the night, turning one into a mobile sleeper. Trying to waken sleepwalkers is fruitless and can be dangerous, since the sleepwalker may feel threatened by physical contact and respond violently. Normally, non-REM sleep shifts into REM sleep, during which there is a loss of muscle tone, preventing motor behavior during REM sleep. The majority of sleepwalking episodes tend to be relatively harmless and usually make for a good story as told by the witness, often beginning with “You won’t believe what you did last night!” And if you are the sleepwalker you don’t believe it, because you will have no memory of your midnight shenanigans. Most parasomniac behaviors appear

What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on. If you could go back into the story of Uncle Ive and Verna Shoals, you would find, certainly before and maybe after, somebody who loved them both. It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.

I worked and worked, and before I knew it, my collage was finished. Still damp from Elmer’s glue, the masterpiece included images of horses--courtesy, coincidentally, of Marlboro cigarette ads--and footballs. There were pictures of Ford pickups and green grass--anything I could find in my old magazines that even remotely hinted at country life. There was a rattlesnake: Marlboro Man hated snakes. And a photo of a dark, starry night: Marlboro Man was afraid of the dark as a child. There were Dr Pepper cans, a chocolate cake, and John Wayne, whose likeness did me a great favor by appearing in some ad in Golf Digest in the early 1980s. My collage would have to do, even though it was missing any images depicting the less tangible things--the real things--I knew about Marlboro Man. That he missed his brother Todd every day of his life. That he was shy in social settings. That he knew off-the-beaten-path Bible stories--not the typical Samson-and-Delilah and David-and-Goliath tales, but obscure, lesser-known stories that I, in a lifetime of skimming, would never have hoped to read. That he hid in an empty trash barrel during a game of hide-and-seek at the Fairgrounds when he was seven…and that he’d gotten stuck and had to be extricated by firefighters. That he hated long pasta noodles because they were too difficult to eat. That he was sweet. Caring. Serious. Strong. The collage was incomplete--sorely lacking vital information.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

Pilgrimage is premised on the idea that the sacred is not entirely immaterial, but that there is a geography of spiritual power. Pilgrimage walks a delicate line between the spiritual and the material in its emphasis on the story and its setting though the search is for spirituality, it is pursued in terms of the most material details of where the Buddha was born or where Christ died, where the relics are or the holy water flows. Or perhaps it reconciles the spiritual and the material, for to go on pilgrimage is to make the body and its actions express the desires and beliefs of the soul. Pilgrimage unites belief with action, thinking with doing, and it makes sense that this harmony is achieved when the sacred has material presence and location. Protestants, as well as the occasional Buddhist and Jew, have objected to pilgrimages as a kind of icon worship and asserted that the spiritual should be sought within as something wholly immaterial, rather than out in the world. There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in Christian pilgrimage, as there is in mountaineering. To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey. Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one's body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the jour ney. Too, we tend to imagine life as a journey, and going on an actual expedition takes hold of that image and makes it concrete, acts it out with the body and the imagination in a world whose geography has become spiritualized. The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling and universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will. In pilgrim age, the journey is radiant with hope that arrival at the tangible destination will bring spiritual benefits with it. The pilgrim has achieved a story of his or her ow and in this way too becomes part of the religion made up of stories of travel and transformation.

you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses. And it is true: the odds, overwhelmingly, tell us that we exist inside a computer. Any universe that can support technological life probably will, given enough time. Any technological civilisation will develop modelling, and will in a comparatively insignificant span be able to model everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter. That being the case, the simulation will rapidly reach the point where it contains simulated computers with the ability to simulate likewise everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter, and so on and so on in an infinite regress limited only by computing power. That might seem like a hard limit, but processing power still doubles every twelve to eighteen months, and doubling is more extraordinary than people understand. There’s a story that the Emperor of China once lost his throne gambling with a peasant, because he agreed if he lost to pay a single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board and double the amount on each square on the next until he had covered the board. His debt for the final square was eighteen and a half million trillion grains. It is almost impossible to imagine the capabilities of a machine that much more powerful than the ones we have today, but I think we can accept it could hold quite a lot of simulations of our world. The odds, therefore, are negligible that we live in the origin universe, and considerable that we are quite a few steps down the layers of reality. Everything you know, everything you have ever seen or experienced, is probably not what it appears to be. The most alarming notion is that someone – or everyone – you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real. Perhaps that explains your sense of unfulfilled potential: you truly are incomplete, a semi-autonomous reflection of something vast. And yet, if so, what does that say about those vast ones beyond? Are they just replicating a truth they secretly recognise about themselves? Russian dolls, one inside the other, until the smallest doll embraces the outermost and everything begins again? Who really inhabits whom, and who is in control?

No one like the Incomplete Stories, so does the God :-)

No one likes incomplete story, so does the God :-)

How to read this book: Even after I was told my father was dead, I believed (I still believe) that I could fix everything- that if I logged enough miles in my VW and kept telling stories through the countless dead ends and breakdowns, I could undo the terrible tree events…not that I should have expected to with this particular power, which is incomplete (as I was forced to sell a few stories and procedures for time-of-money), full of holes. Sure, the book turns on, lights up; its fans whirr and the bookengine crunches. But some of the pages are completely blank; others hang by a thread. the book’s transmission is shot, too, so don’t’ be surprised if the book slips from one version to the next as you’re reading .Finally, the thermostat’s misked, so you should expect sudden changes in temperature, the pages might get cold, or it may begin to snow between paragraphs, or you may turn the page and get hit with a faceful of rain or blinding beams of sunlight. So go ahead. Do it-open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see you. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading, and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you are absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords- your fratures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people…your stories are written right there on your face!

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.…

Significance is built through the use of many expressive and symbolic forms: rituals, ceremonies, stories, and music. An organization without a rich symbolic life grows empty and barren. The magic of special occasions is vital in building significance into collective life. Moments of ecstasy are parentheses that mark life’s major passages. Without ritual and ceremony, transition remains incomplete, a clutter of comings and goings; “life becomes an endless set of Wednesdays” (Campbell, 1983, p. 5).

read a story from Plato, who claimed that in the ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half—man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their lives searching for their other halves.