In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

Taken at face value, the remark warns that perfectionism can become a kind of living death: an insistence on flawlessness that arrests action, spontaneity, and the capacity to begin again. To “go on living” implies endurance through contingency—accepting error, limitation, and the unfinished character of human projects. In an Arendtian key, the line resonates with her emphasis on natality (the human capacity to initiate) and on action in a plural world where outcomes cannot be fully controlled. Perfectionism, by contrast, seeks total mastery and can collapse into paralysis or self-erasure. Escaping it is thus not lowering standards so much as choosing life, risk, and renewal over sterile completion.