Quotes & Sayings About Finishing What You Started

I started seriously applying myself to writing fiction immediately after I finished graduate school. By 'seriously,' I mean that, instead of noodling along on a story, finishing it or not as the mood struck me, I set out to complete what I started, to polish it to the best of my ability, and to send out the finished story. — Jane Lindskold

We never work on only one project because we never know if we will get permission for a project. So, for 'Over the River,' we started in 1992. I was just finishing 'The Umbrellas' in Japan and California, and I was also working on getting permission to wrap the Reichstag. — Christo

Just because the road ahead is long, is no reason to slow down. Just because there is much work to be done, is no reason to get discouraged. It is a reason to get started, to grow, to find new ways, to reach within yourself and discover strength, commitment, and determination. The road ahead is long and difficult, but it's filled with opportunity. Start what needs starting. Finish what needs finishing. Get on the road. Stay on the road. Don't give up. — Ralph Marston

You know, I started this process of being a football player and I'm going to make it to the NFL very soon and I plan on finishing that. And by 'finishing that,' I mean that I'm going to go out and be the best that I can be and put everything forth to make that happen. — Robert Griffin III

Getting organized in the normal routines of life and finishing little projects you've started is an important first step toward realizing larger goals. If you can't get a handle on the small things, how will you ever get it together to focus on the big things? — Joyce Meyer

In her most recent project, she tested 356 children, ages five to ten, who were brought to Monell to determine their "bliss point" for sugar31. The bliss point is the precise amount of sweetness - no more, no less - that makes food and drink most enjoyable. She was finishing up this project in the fall of 2010 when she agreed to show me some of the methods she had developed. Before we got started, I did a little research on the term bliss point itself. Its origins are murky, having some roots in economic theory. In relation to sugar, however, the term appears to have been coined in the 1970s by a Boston mathematician named Joseph Balintfy, who used computer modeling to predict eating behavior. The concept has obsessed the food industry ever since. — Michael Moss

Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey
it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done. — Jonathan Carroll

Deeply moved, she poured the tea while they were finishing up. They came into the kitchen to replace the cleaning things, and she handed two cups to Om.
Noticing the red rose borders, he started to point out her error, "The pink one's for us," then stopped. Her face told him she was aware of it.
"What?" she asked, taking the pink cup for herself, "Is something wrong?"
"Nothing," his voice caught . He turned away, hoping she did not see the film of water glaze his eyes. — Rohinton Mistry

The night we met, we started off with coffee and politics, but it was one of those nights where you just can't stop talking. Where you're finishing each other's sentences, and it's like you've just met.. but also like you've known each other forever. Where you find yourself telling secrets that you've never told anyone else before in your life. — Steph Campbell

It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self-confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started. — Gudjon Bergmann

Anyone who has attempted to create knows the hellishness of it, which consists in the final inescapability from it. Knows that anything, however deadly humdrum to drug the senses, is preferable to it. Knows the gigantic effort to get started on the boundless, unwieldy, shapeless material; the forest of hesitations; of what to keep and what to throw out; the running-out terror and reluctance in one of finishing. — Caitlin Thomas

Starting means you're going to finish. If it doesn't ship, you've failed. You haven't poked the box if the box doesn't realize it's been poked. To merely start without finishing is just boasting, or stalling, or a waste of time. I have no patience at all for people who believe they are doing their best work but are hiding it from the market. If you don't ship, you actually haven't started anything at all. At some point, your work has to intersect with the market. At some point, you need feedback as to whether or not it worked. Otherwise, it's merely a hobby. — Seth Godin

At the end of the race nobody really cares about how you started, so stay laser focused and finish strong. Get ready to proclaim "I did it! — Farshad Asl

After finishing grad school, the Little Mermaid started a nonprofit to fight for the rights of mercitizens. She decided at that moment that she would never measure her success by financial gain, but instead only by how much good she contributed to the world. Money was irrelevant to her.

Later that day she got her first student loan bill. — Tim Manley

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. — Ben Aaronovitch

I started a novel right before 'The Imitation Game,' so it's funny now, four years later, to be coming almost back to finishing it. — Graham Moore

It started as a hobby when I was a kid, and I'm finishing as a hobby. — Dick Trickle

I finished school, because I started when I was thirteen, so basically around 16 or 17, I just focused on finishing high school. — Jhene Aiko

Much of the stress that people feel doesn't come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they've started. — David Allen

I had a veritable rnania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, Never more! — Nikola Tesla

As long as I have other ideas and projects noted, I feel confident that they'll be alright until I get to them. And my ideas and tastes may have evolved by the time I get to them so that an idea can be discarded or expanded upon in ways that I wouldn't have thought of had I started on that project right away instead of finishing what I was currently on. It's good to give those ideas time to ripen and blossom. — Nicholas Trandahl

If I had to pick one form of acting, it would be live theater. That's where I started; that's where I became a man, I think I'm still finishing up that job. — Nick Offerman

I took off my sweatshirt and dropped it on the grass and set off around the track. As soon as I started running, the world changed. The bodies spread out across the green of the football field were parts of a scene remembered, not one real at this moment. The secret of effort is to keep on, I told myself. Not for the world would I have stopped then, and yet nothing- not even if I had been turned handsome as a reward for finishing- could have made up for the curious pain of the effort. — Harold Brodkey

That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Thus, after finishing high school, I started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. — Richard Ernst

I'm sorry, I'm always saying silly things I guess. I must've overdone it today in the bakery."
"See now, that's a great excuse. I usually blame all the silly things I say on syphilis." I started to laugh at my own joke before even finishing it. However, after seven seconds of dismayed stares and silence, I realized that maybe STD humor was lost on this crowd. — Penny Reid

When I went to college, I did clothing and textiles. It really wasn't until I moved to New York, my second night in, I did stand-up. I took a wild left turn, and instead of going back and finishing school at FIT, I started doing stand-up and acting. — Melissa McCarthy

Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways. — James Gleick

After finishing art school I was applying to stores like Home Depot and Walmart. You know, places where you have to take a urine test before you get your minimum wage. Even those places wouldn't hire me. So I was lucky when I got included in a group show at the Richard Heller gallery that kind of started my art career. — Marcel Dzama

When I started finishing games and coming off the field shaking hands, it was a beautiful thing. I mean, you start seeing that you're an important part of the team. — Dennis Eckersley

I think it started with both the shows and the box set from finishing White Material. I think we were also pretty desperate to get it released. We felt pretty proud of it, and it just escalated from there. We were thinking about playing some live shows, doing the soundtracks live. It was just trying to shine a little light on this 15 years of work we've done. — Stuart A. Staples

I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time. — Patrick Rothfuss