Fragments Quotes

Harold, Julia - are you kidding? There's nothing - nothing - I've ever wanted more. My whole life. I just never thought - He stopped; he was speaking in fragments. For a minute they were all quiet, and he was finally able to look at both of them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic. ~ Kenneth Clark

In case you haven't noticed, Salvador, I'm a woman. A woman who loves you…' She saw his expression suddenly freeze with a watchful intensity. '…Yes, loves you. Fighting against your stubbornness, your arrogance, and fragments of your twisted imagination ~ Hannah Fielding

A hotel is like a prison, he thought. The rooms are cells holding secrets and passions. Then something happens, the smallest thing, and the doors fly open. The explosion goes off. Panic. And fragments of truth. ~ E. Howard Hunt

Boys often have permission to become men without the forfeiture of their desirability. And so these men write stories that grasp at girls who are ghosts twice over: first by being dead and second by being shallow shadows of actual girls, the assorted fragments of men's aging imaginations rather than the deep and dimensioned creatures that real girls are. ~ Alana Massey

And aye, beside her stalks her amarous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms glean an unearthly white,
Ah! thus thro' broken clouds at night's high Noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orb'd harvest-moon! ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

At the edge of who you are, you may find the fragments of your original beginnings. ~ Talismanist Giebra

Scrying the wind is very difficult, Tris," Niko said gently. "It's like scrying the future. You're assailed with thousands of images - fragments, really. It drives many who try it insane." "You learned to scry the future," Tris pointed out. "And a number of people have informed me they think I am mad," Niko replied, his voice very dry. ~ Tamora Pierce

Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent. I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them. ~ Milan Kundera

Little Cinder

Girl, they can't understand you.
You rise from the as-heap in a blaze
and only then do they recognize you
as their one true love.

While you pray beneath your mother's
tree you carrve a phoenix into your palm
wth aa hazel twig and coal;
every night she devours more of you.

You used to believe in angels.
Now you believe in the makeover;
if you can't get the grime off your face
and your foot into a size six heel

who will ever bother to notice you?
The kettle and the broom sear in your grasp,
snap into fragments. The turtledoves sing,
"There's blood within the shoe."

You deserve the palace, you think, as you signal
the pigeons to attack, approve the barrel filled with red-hot nails.
Its great hearth beckons, and the prince's flag
rises crimson in the angry sun.

He will love you for the heat you generate,
for the flames you ignite around you,
though he encase your tiny feet in glass
to keep them from scorching the ground. ~ Jeannine Hall Gailey

From schools to universities to research institutes, we teach about origins in disconnected fragments. We seem incapable of offering a unified account of how things came to be the way they are. ~ David Christian

Most of what I want simply slips away like water flowing through a net, and always what remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images ... that sink into countless strata in my mind. ~ Daido Moriyama

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seem like artifacts from a long-lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass. ~ Matthew Flaming

I shall never forget my admiration for that German pilot, who single handed, fought seven of us for ten minutes. I saw him go into a fairly steep dive and so I continued to watch, and then saw the triplane hit the ground and disappear into a thousand fragments, for it seemed to me that it literally went into powder. ~ James McCudden

Anytime I got too happy, I could just assume something fragile and lovely was lying in wait, ready to shower my world in glass fragments and sticky lemon slices. ~ Laura Creedle

It should be carefully noted that Jesus did not say, "I am one of the equally good ways" or "I am a better way than the others, I am an aspect of truth; I am a fragment of the life." Instead, His claim was absolute, and allegiance to Him as the Savior of the world, was to take precedence over all the claims of men and religions. ~ Walter Martin

He didn't have to remember, I remembered. I had bronzed the words. No, they were fragments of bullet, lodged in my heart. Whenever I moved a certain way they ached, so I learned a totally different way, a new walk, except it wasn't really a walk, it was more a permanent limp. ~ Thomas Rayfiel

The integrative powers of life are manifested in the phenomena of symbiosis between organelles, in the varied forms of partnership within the same species or between different species; in the phenomena of regeneration, in lower species, of complete individuals from their fragments; in the re-formation of scrambled embryonic organs, etc. The self-assertive tendency is equally ubiquitous in the competitive struggle for life. ~ Arthur Koestler

All of this seemed equally trifling to him now. And when he thought again about the world of free people, the difference between it and the miseries and joys of this place seemed minimal. If three tiny fragments of tea leaf chanced to fall into a prisoner's battered cup, he relished them. In Leningrad during the interval at the opera a woman sipped champagne with the same pleasure. Their sufferings were also comparable. Both the prisoner and the woman had painful shoes. Hers were narrow evening shoes which she took off during the performance. The prisoner suffered from what they wore in the camp, section of tyres into which you thrust your foot wrapped in rags and fastened with string. The woman at the opera knew that somewhere in the world there were millions of beings transformed into gaunt animals, their faces blackened by the polar winds. But this did not stop her drinking her glass of wine amid the glittering of the great mirrors. The prisoner knew that a warm and brilliant life was lived elsewhere in tranquility but this did not spoil his pleasure as he chewed those fragments of tea leaf.... ~ Andrei Makine

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing. ~ Gore Vidal

Dispersal was a conscious strategy of the plunderers. Only by destroying these collections could they build up new ones. Many of these libraries were the results of decades, sometimes centuries, of careful collecting. There had been generations of learned collectors and readers. The books also said something about the people who owned and treasured them: what they read and what they thought and what they dreamed. Sometimes they left traces in the form of underlined passages, notations, notes in the margins, or short comments. The beautiful and personally designed ex librises that many readers had made for their books demonstrate the care and pride they took in their libraries. Each collection in its own right took form in a unique culture, a depiction of its creator's world, which was lost when the library was broken up. The books are fragments of a library, of a world that once existed. ~ Anders Rydell

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since. ~ Arthur Golden

The student of Torah is like the amnesia victim who tries to reconstruct from fragments the beautiful world he once experienced. By learning Torah, man returns to his own self. ~ Joseph B. Soloveitchik

All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical: and not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe:

So that how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation of cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature beat to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship: ~ James Agee

The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder ... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have
very largely if not entirely
lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction. ~ Iain M. Banks

In a small town, unexplained tragedy can only go so long before it grows teeth, sprouts sharp claws, and turns, snarling, on its own self. Before fragments of gossip become rumors, and the rumors become suspicions. Before neighbors start eyeing each other with the mistrustful narrowness of oft-kicked dogs. Inside the safe shelter of their homes, husbands and wives draw the blinds tight and turn to each other, worrying at small bits of information and wondering who, who among their shrinking circle of trusted friends, might still know something he isn't telling. ~ Kat Rosenfield

Landscapes of fields and small clusters of buildings hurtle past outside like fragments of songs never sung in their entirety. ~ Glenn Haybittle

Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion - that everything must finally be made comprehensible - then some general rescue of the sort I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for , if not to be knit up finally? ~ Marilynne Robinson

God always was, and always is, and always will be. Or rather, God always Is. For Was and Will be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature, but He is Eternal Being. And this is the Name that He gives to Himself when giving the Oracle to Moses in the Mount. For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future; like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature, only adumbrated [intimated] by the mind, and that very dimly and scantily. ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

This is the very basis of inspiration and friendship, both of which are, in essence, spiritual connections. No two people are exactly the same, though they may share fragments of each other's personality. Some may feel so uncannily connected as to be kindred spirits, watching the world through different eyes but hearts aligned, the canvas of consciousness cast in common colors, struggling to express the same thoughts and gleefully snapping their fingers when the other puts it just right, finishing each other's sentences on page, screen, or scroll - across the decades, centuries, millennia. Great men and women influence "a number of people," even after they die. People will take up their mantle and continue the endless work of human progress. By giving new voice to the echoes fading in time, we elevate both ourselves and the person from whom we draw inspiration. Our souls interpenetrate through the broken chains of eternity, and through us, they live once again. ~ Shmuel Pernicone

All really good writers use fragments. ~ Priscilla Long

The problem with keeping money in a bank is that in the blink of a tiger's eye it will turn on you: what's yours becomes theirs, what was your sweat and labor and sold off portions of a lifetime become a stranger's. This problem - this banking problem - gnaws at the forefront of Hock Seng's mind, a genehack weevil that he cannot dig out and cannot pinch into pus and exoskeleton fragments.

Imagined in terms of the time - time spent earning wages that a bank then holds - a bank can own more than half of a man. Well, at least a third, even if you are a lazy Thai. And a man without one third of his life, in truth, has no life at all.

Which third can a man lose? The third from his chest to the top of his balding skull? From his waist to his yellowing toenails? Two legs and an arm? Two arms and a head? A quarter of a man, cut away, might still hope to survive, but a third is too much to tolerate.

This is the problem with a bank. As soon as you place your money in its mouth, it turns out that the tiger has gotten its teeth locked around your head. One third, or one half, or just a liver-spotted skull, it might as well be all.

But if a bank cannot be trusted, what can? ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

When we fall in love, we recognise in the other the fragments of ourselves that we have lost. ~ Dragos Bratasanu

Life is good, and there's no reason to think it won't be
right up until the moment when everything explodes into a fireball of tiny, unrecognizable fragments, or it all goes skidding sideways, through the guardrail, over the embankment, and down the mountain. This will happen (and probably more than once). ~ Michael J. Fox

We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities - the hallmarks of civilisation. ~ Kathleen Jamie

They did not use the sonic stunners but the foray gun, the ancient weapon that fires a set of metal fragments in a burst. They shot to kill him. He was dying when I got to him, sprawled and twisted away from his skis that stuck up out of the snow, his chest half shot away. I took his head in my arms and spoke to him, but he never answered me; only in a way he answered my love for him, crying out through the silent wreck and tumult of his mind as consciousness lapsed, in the unspoken tongue, once, clearly, 'Arek!' Then no more. I held him, crouching there in the snow, while he died. They let me do that. Then they made me get up, and took me off one way and him another, I going to prison and he into the dark. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If the egg splits, its sides falling open just enough for the fuzz-capped head of the child to emerge, then the story might be allowed to end. When the egg is found crushed, wet pieces tucked quickly into the open mouth of the tree, then we have little choice but to begin again. Often, after peeking through loose fingers held as wings over our eyes, we look for fragments, hoping they remain piled, split and sharded, not growing, as magnets, back together. ~ Kelli Allen

Palestinian weddings are celebrated over coffee, but when a young man is killed his mother is held up over his grave. 'Trill out your zaghrouda [ululation], his friends say, the shabab who might die tomorrow. A mother says to me: 'Our joy-cries now only ring out in the face of death. Our world is upside down.'
Under the Gun, A Palestinian Journey - MEZZATERRA: FRAGMENTS FROM THE COMMON GROUND ~ Ahdaf Soueif

She [Bernice] didn't like anything that had an adult theme, with only one exception, her collection of erotic female memorabilia. They were all antiques, fragments of other women's sexuality that was somehow easier to deal with than her own. ~ K. Ford K.

The existence of any library, even mine, allows readers a sense of what their craft is truly about, a craft that struggles against the stringencies of time by bringing fragments of the past into their present. It grants them a glimpse, however secret or distant, into the minds of other human beings, and allows them a certain knowledge of their own condition through the stories stored here for their perusal. Above all, it tells readers that their craft consist of the power to remember, actively, through the prompt of the page, selected moments of the human experience. This was the great practice established by the Library of Alexandria. ~ Alberto Manguel

God has not revealed all things to man and has entrusted us with but a fragment of His mighty work. But He who directs all things, who has established and laid the foundation of the world, who has clothed Himself with Creation, He is greater and better than that which He has wrought. Hidden from our eyes, He can only be reached by the spirit. ~ Seneca The Younger

Can I get to the bottle of Old Crow and mix it up with the remains of these ice fragments ... a cool drink for the freak? Give the gentleman something cool, dear, can't you see he's wired his brain to the water pump and his ears to the generator ... ~ Hunter S. Thompson

These fragments I have shored against my ruins ~ T. S. Eliot

It was no easy task to tame the barbarians' language. One quick three-week-old autumn, the brothers were sitting in their cell, trying to write out the letters that men would later call Cyrillic. They were not getting anywhere. Fromm the cell you could clearly see half of October, and in it the silence was one hour's walk long and two hours' walk wide. Then Methodius called his brother's attention to four jugs standing on the window of their cell, but outside, on the other side of the bars. "If the doors were locked, how could I get to one of those jugs?" he asked. Constantine broke one of the jugs, then drew the fragments piece by piece through the bars and into the cell, where he reassembled the jug, bonding it with saliva and clay from the floor beneath his feet. This they now did with the Slavonic language: they broke it in pieces, drew it into their mouths through the bars of Cyril's letters, and bonded the fragments with their saliva and the Greek clay beneath the soles of their feet. ~ Milorad Pavic

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. ~ William Gibson

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence. ~ Charles Dickens

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home
only the millions of last moments ... nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments. ~ Thomas Pynchon

We made a pact the day you left for Novo - I know you don't remember that, but I do - and I'm holding fast to our promise. To never give up hope. And I have hope, because I know that deep-down, hidden within the innermost fragments of your heart is the love you feel for me. I know it's still there, waiting to be reclaimed. When it comes to you, no amount of time spent waiting is a waste. ~ Siobhan Davis

The Cyclops was about to roll the stone back into place, when from somewhere outside Annabeth shouted, "Hello, ugly!"

Polyphemus stiffened. "Who said that?"

"Nobody!" Annabeth yelled.

That got exactl;y the reaction she'd been hoping for. The monster's face turned red with rage.

"Nobody!" Polyphemus yelled back. "I remember you!"

"You're too stupid to remember anybody," Annabeth taunted. "Much less Nobody."

I hoped to the gods she was already moving when she said that, because Polyphemus bellowed furiously, grabbed the nearest boulder (which happened to be his front door) and threw it toward the sound of Annabeth's voice. I heard the rock smash into a thousand fragments.

To a terrible moment, there was silence. Then Annabeth shouted, "You haven't learned to throw any better, either!"

Polyphemus howled. "Come here! Let me kill you, Nobody!"

"You can't kill Nobody, you stupid oaf," she taunted. "Come find me!"

Polyphemus barreled down the hill toward her voice.

Now, the "Nobody" thing would have confused anybody, but Annabeth had explained to me that it was the name Odysseus had used to trick Polyphemus centuries ago, right before he poked the Cyclops's eye out with a large hot stick. Annabeth had figured Polyphemus would still have a grudge about that name, and she was right. In his frenzy to find his old enemy, he forgot about resealing the cave entrance. Ap ~ Rick Riordan

The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don't trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals ... It lures us to leap off high cliffs, fling ourselves on towering waves, leaves behind everyone we love and face into thousands of miles of open water for the sake of what might be on the far shore. ~ Tana French

The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I'm starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn't it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn't it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, "I've had enough," ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt. ~ Ron Padget

As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since swept from earth. "Thus," said I, "shall the present generation - he who now sink in misery - and he who now swim in pleasure, alike pass away and be forgotten. ~ Ann Radcliffe

All that you may achieve or discover you will regard as a fragment of a larger pattern of the truth which from the separate approaches every true scholar is striving to descry. ~ Abbott L. Lowell

But a democracy is bound in the end to be obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness. ~ D.H. Lawrence

And again. I kept clicking until the photograph was demolished, until it was no more than a mosaic of gray tiles, adding up to nothing.
Nothing. Because wasn't that how I felt that day? If you zoom close - if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself - then you
lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can't see anything anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments.
English becomes math. ~ David Levithan

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world. ~ Edgar Quinet

I walked alone through the twilit street. The wind was whirling, driving, carrying me like a slip of paper. Fragments of cast-iron sky flew and flew-they had another day, two days to hurtle through infinity ...
The unifs of passersby brushed against me, but I walked alone. I saw it clearly: everyone was saved, but there was no salvation for me. I did not want salvation ... (c) ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

Arise my soul, arise to lighter ways,
So cast aside dark shadows haunting thee;
O view the orbs and spheres of brighter days,
Lost fragments fraught with broken ecstasy. ~ Timothy Salter

Language is double-edged; through words a fuller view of reality emerges, but words can also serve to fragment reality. ~ Vera John-Steiner

To avoid beautiful thoughts turning into suffering, she developed a method: when
something positive to do with Ralf Hart came into her head - and this could be the fire
and the wine, an idea she would like to discuss with him, or simply the pleasurable
longing involved in wanting to know when he would come back - Maria would stop what she was doing, smile up at the sky and give thanks for being alive and to be expecting nothing from the man she loved.
On the other hand, if her heart began to complain about his absence or about things she shouldn't have said while they were together,
she would say to herself:
'Oh, so you want to think about that, do you? All right, then, you do what you like, while I get on with more important things.'
She would continue to read or, if she was out, she would focus her attention on everything around her: colours, people, sounds - especially sounds, the sound of her own footsteps, of the pages turning, of cars, of fragments of conversations, and the unfortunate
thought would eventually go away. ~ Paulo Coelho

So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Koran is just God's unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Koran has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Koran has a history too. The Sana'a fragments will help us do that. ~ Gerd R. Puin

Once, I discovered it propped up on my sister's pillow, its neck wrapped in one of our mother's best linen dishtowels. Cookie fragments on dolls' plates were laid out around it, mixed with berries from the prickly-berry hedge, like offerings made to appease an idol. It was wearing a chaplet woven of carrot fronds and marigolds that my sister and Leonie had picked in the garden. The flowers were wilted, the garland was lopsided; the effect was astonishingly depraved, as if a debauched Roman emperor had arrived on the scene and had hacked off his own body in a maiden's chamber as the ultimate sexual thrill. ~ Margaret Atwood

Practice is funny that way. For days and days, you make out only the fragments of what to do. And then one day you've got the thing whole. Conscious learning becomes unconscious knowledge, and you cannot say precisely how. ~ Atul Gawande

THE BARROW

In this high field strewn with stones
I walk by a green mound,
Its edges sheared by the plough.
Crumbs of animal bone
Lie smashed and scattered round
Under the clover leaves
And slivers of flint seem to grow
Like white leaves among green.
In the wind, the chestnut heaves
Where a man's grave has been.

Whatever the barrow held
Once, has been taken away:
A hollow of nettles and dock
Lies at the centre, filled
With rain from a sky so grey
It reflects nothing at all.
I poke in the crumbled rock
For something they left behind
But after that funeral
There is nothing at all to find.

On the map in front of me
The gothic letters pick out
Dozens of tombs like this,
Breached, plundered, left empty,
No fragments littered about
Of a dead and buried race
In the margins of histories.
No fragments: these splintered bones
Construct no human face,
These stones are simply stones.

In museums their urns lie
Behind glass, and their shaped flints
Are labelled like butterflies.
All that they did was die,
And all that has happened since
Means nothing to this place.
Above long clouds, the skies
Turn to a brilliant red
And show in the water's face
One living, and not these dead."

- Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree ~ Anthony Thwaite

What do I think was modernism's subject, then? What was it about? No doubt you can guess my starting point. It was about steam - in both the Malevich and the de Chirico a train still rushes across the landscape. It was about change and power and contingency, in other words, but also control, compression, and captivity - an absurd or oppressive orderliness is haunting the bright new fields and the sunlit squares with their eternally flapping flags. Modernism presents us with a world becoming a realm of appearances - fragments, patchwork quilts of color, dream-tableaux made out of disconnected phantasms. But all of this is still happening in modernism, and still resisted as it is described. The two paintings remain shot through, it seems to me, with the effort to answer back to the flattening and derealizing-the will to put the fragments back into some sort of order. Modernism is agonized, but its agony is not separable from weird levity or whimsy. Pleasure and horror go together in it. Malevich may be desperate, or euphoric. He may be pouring scorn on the idea of collective man, or spelling the idea out with utter childish optimism. We shall never know his real opinions. His picture entertains both.

Modernism was certainly about the pathos of dream and desire in twentieth- century circumstances, but, again, the desires were unstoppable, ineradicable. The upright man will not let go of the future. The infinite still exists at the top of the tower. Even in the Picasso ~ T.J. Clark

Some of your best songs come from a desperate attempt to escape, so sitting in an airport for hours I can just start pulling out little fragments of songs from my head. A lot of times a melody will just occur to me and be my companion for a couple of months. ~ Andrew Bird

We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods. ~ Wendell Berry

I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings [ ... ] My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort ~ Henry Miller

We are all fragments of one another, strewn across... borders. ~ Isabel Quintero

My ice-cream is melting just as quickly as Danny's and is dripping down my chin, across my wrist, and onto my thigh. I laugh, throwing my head back and covering my eyes so as not to be blinded by happiness, and it is in this moment of weightlessness that I am suddenly aware of the lightest touch on my skin, like the wings of a butterfly. It flutters against my thigh then lingers on my wrist, but before its delicate wings reach my face, I force my eyes open and see only fragments: pink lips, a tanned cheek, the features and lines of a face silhouetted against the bright sunlight. My nostrils draw in his scent for the very first time and it is so strong that he is not just next to me but intimately close. His smell instantly takes me prisoner, overpowering me to such an extent that I have forgotten who and where I am.
I know that, moments before, Alex was using his lips and tongue to clean the melted ice-cream off my thigh and wrist and inadvertently treating me to the most ecstatic experience of my life. My body and mind are adrift in a sea of bliss, the sounds of the park suddenly fade away, and the world and everyone in it cease to exist. All I can see is a blindingly bright light and all I can feel are a man's moist lips touching mine. Alex's hot, passionate mouth is kissing me greedily as if there is finally enough air; as if he had been suffocating, but now he can breathe.
I know that a kiss like this is neither flirting nor dating and can sense with every fibr ~ Victoria Sobolev

There are no individuals in the world only fragments of families ~ Carl Whitaker

As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr's hard and beautiful book. I can pretty much hear its author speak - a whispering that enables us into its world ... a masterfully sutured journey, painfully useful. Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines is a book I know I will return to. And urge it on my friends who have lives too and write in them. ~ Eileen Myles

It's funny. Looking back, none of it seems to matter now, those moments of yearning, craving to belong with people I thought mattered. No more fragments of glass, pieces of a broken mirror you can't put back together and wouldn't want to even if you could. ~ Rebecca Harris

He never spoke a word; yet my entire body was aflame. With shameful joy in my heart, I trembled as I moved against his hands, seeking more of the delicious rapture he was giving me. He played me like a stringed instrument, awakening within me a harmony that I had never known existed, producing profound and unimagined tunes.
When I felt him enter me I clung to him, pressing him ever closer, our two bodies fused as one. As he moved with me towards the brink of ecstasy, I was overwhelmed by an intense need that until that moment had never been recognized. All at once, just as I heard his own fevered exclamation, I felt the core of my womanhood explode with pleasure, as if my body had splintered into a thousand brilliant fragments of sensation and light. ~ Syrie James

My past identity separates from me and remains in the past; he becomes someone else. Is memory really as insubstantial as the fragments of information that we store in our heads? ~ Hideo Kojima

I am pieces of a person, forever preserved when they were chipped off. There's nothing but fragments inside a skin. ~ Ellen Mint

I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what I'm hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want. ~ James Salter

wings greater than wings
wings greater than walls ~ Sun Ra

An imperfectly remembered life is a useless treachery. Every day, more fragments of the past roll around heavily in the chambers of an empty brain, shedding bits of color, a sentence or a fragrance, something that changes and then disappears. It drops like a stone to the bottom of the cave. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

By all kinds of traps and sign-boards, threatening the extreme penalty of the divine law, exclude such trespassers from the only ground which can be sacred to you. It is so hard to forget what it is worse than useless to remember! If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the bar-room and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications. Only the character of the hearer determines to which it shall be open, and to which closed. I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality. Our very intellect shall be macadamized, as it were,--its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over; and if you would know what will make for the most durable pavement, surpassing rolled stones, spruce blocks, and asphaltum, you have only to look into some of our minds which have been subjected to this treatment so long. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine. ~ Ian McEwan

Newspapers appeared like oracles on your doorstep- gilded fragments of anonymous love. ~ Susan Rich

I have a shoebox: for ideas, fragments, snatches of conversation I hear. I scrawl it down, throw the scraps in the box. Every time I start a new script I start picking through the pieces. Suddenly you get five pieces together and think: this is almost the first Act of a movie, if I flesh it out a bit. ~ Shane Black

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of. ~ Elena Ferrante

Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Mahomet; each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion; and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage. ~ Edward Gibbon

Love was slow, creeping poison, loge was treacherous and insincere, love was a veil thrown over the misery of the world, love was sticky and indigestible, it was a mirror in which one could be what one was not, it was a spectre that spread hope where hope had long since dies, it was a hiding place where people thought they found refuge and ultimately found only themselves, it was a vague memory of another love, it was the possibility of a salvation that was ultimately equivalent to a coup de grace, it was a war without victors, it was a precious jewel amid broken fragments you cut yourself on: yes, Brilka, in those days that was love. ~ Nino Haratischwili

Yes," I said, staring at the way the sunshine glinted, quite prettily, on the broken fragments. Odd that something so wrecked could be so beautiful. ~ Harlem Dae

The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me. ~ James Russell Lowell

For paradise we long. For perfection we were made ... This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives ... This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for ... nothing less than perfect communion with the ... one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together ... we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled ... The only death to fear is the death of settling for something less. ~ Richard John Neuhaus

After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with.
He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. ~ Douglas Adams

If she possessed any memory whatsoever of the days when she'd been whole, her shattered recollections were scattered across the darkscape of her mind in fragments so minuscule that she could no more easily piece them together than she could gather from the beach all the tiny chips of broken seashells, worn to polished flakes by ages of relentless tides, and reassemble them into their original architectures. ~ Dean Koontz

I have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children. ~ Edwin A. Abbott

The bowed head, the buried face. She is silent, she will never speak, never forgive, never reach a hand, never leave this frozen present tense. All waits, suspended. Suspended the autumn trees, the autumn sky, anonymous people. A blackbird, poor fool, sings out of season from the willows by the lake. A flight of pigeons over the houses; fragments of freedom, hazard, an anagram made flesh. And somewhere the stinging smell of burning leaves. ~ John Fowles

I try to concentrate on the words, on the melody, but then she starts searching through songs, and this feels like my brain - fragments of words, fragments of melodies, fragments of moments, fragments of things. ~ Jennifer Niven

If you have been brave enough to love, and somtimes you won and sometimes you lost; if you have cared enough to try, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't; if you have been bold enough to dream and found yourself with some dreams that came true and a lot of broken pieces of dreams that didn't, that fell to earth and shattered,then you can look back from the mountaintop you now find yourself standing on, like Moses contemplating the tablets that would guide human behavior for a millenia, resting in the Ark alongside the broken fragments of an earlier dream. And you, like Moses, can realize how ful your life has been and how richly you are blessed. ~ Harold S. Kushner

In fact the flexibility of our memories makes it relatively easy because we can meld all these different memories together seamlessly to invent a new imaginary scene, one which we have never even contemplated before, let alone witnessed. The flexibility of memory seems to be the key to imagining a future. Our millions of fragments of memories from different times of our lives are not set in stone; they can change, giving us endless, instant imaginative possibilities. ~ Claudia Hammond

It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. ~ Michel De Certeau

So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too. ~ Rachel Cusk

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being. ~ Pierre Teilhard De Chardin