" She is beginning to understand that completion is not so much about reaching perfection as it is making the choice to look away from the material. What was it Khalil used to say when she couldn't finish a paper in college? Be a completionist, not a perfectionist. Gloria was a perfectionist. It wasn't that she didn't have the stamina to finish her dissertation on Zora Neale Hurston and the triple consciousness of black women protagonists; it was that she could not tear herself away from the material. She couldn't bear to leave Janie behind. Because Gloria understood that to finish something–to make something right and final–is to kill it. "

― Danzy Senna , New People