Quotes & Sayings About Fragments

I am a writer of fragments. — Guillermo Cabrera Infante

...most ghosts are a rag and a bone and a hank of hair at best--a memory fragment stuck on continual loop, just dust and PKE and water-vapour with no real "there" there. Leftover fragments of psychic energy deluded into believing in their own personality; an echo cobbled together from memory and pain, with no self-awareness as such 'cept what we give them. Survival instinct, with no survival. — Gemma Files

His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past. His father, meanwhile, had no idea that such a vivid scene was burned into Tengo's brain or that, like a cow in the meadow, Tengo was endlessly regurgitating fragments of the scene to chew on, a cud from which he obtained essential nutrients. Father and son: each was locked in a deep, dark embrace with his secrets. — Haruki Murakami

Ghosts are just pieces of memory. They haunt us because we don't want to forget. We are the ghost makers. We take fragments of the dead and project them onto shadows and sounds, trying to make sense of loss by assigning it a new shape. Ghosts aren't real. — Carrie Arcos

Breaking this truth into fragments for our better understanding, it would seem that there is within each of us an enemy which we tolerate at our peril. Jesus called it "life" and "self," or as we would say, the self-life. Its chief characteristic is its possessiveness: the words "gain" and "profit" suggest this. To allow this enemy to live is in the end to lose everything. To repudiate it and give up all for Christ's sake is to lose nothing at last, but to preserve everything unto life eternal. And possibly also a hint is given here as to the only effective way to destroy this foe: it is by the Cross. "Let him take up his cross and follow me. — A.W. Tozer

She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and elementary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate, lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers. Together they groped in this difficult region, where the unfinished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the complete and the satisfactory. The future emerged more splendid than ever from this construction of the present. — Virginia Woolf

We live in an immense world, whole universes of taste and touch and scent, of voices commingling in the light, and dying away with the common dread that stands at every man's door. Yet we perceive and remember this world only as it creates those single fragments of experience: moments of everyday kindness, or self-sacrificing love, or unthinkable brutality. — Bruce Holsinger

At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books. — Umberto Eco

I have always thought of memories as fragments, like colored glass shards in a kaleidoscope. It is the source of great beauty in our lives, yet the cause of such heartache. — Lang Leav

You can have a pretty good first line but not a strong enough thought to tag along more lines and sometimes in the middle words become bored and make war on one another. Notebooks are full of these fragments, shrapnel of our intention. Life is short on conclusions and that's why it's often a struggle to end a poem. — Jim Harrison

You have not known even a fragment of My reality. The full nature of this reality can never be understood by anyone. — Sathya Sai Baba

Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. — Marcel Proust

His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web-all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a dare-devil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night,an actress who ran away with a millionaire- the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned. — Michael Ondaatje

If I do anything, I have to start over, but all I have is fragments of ideas. Just pieces. Like a germ of an idea for this, and a germ of an idea for that. Nothing whole or concrete" - Violet

" 'Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.' Pearl S. Buck. Maybe a germ is enough. Maybe it's all you need. We can start small. Open up a new document or pull out a black piece of paper. We'll make it our canvas. Remember what Michelangelo said about the sculpture being in the stone - it was there from the beginning, and his job was to bring it out. Your words are in there too" -Finch — Jennifer Niven

There was an air of vague and unsettling paranoia, an undercurrent of rumors, snatched fragments of conversation anticipating future revolution. — Patti Smith

Live in fragments no longer, only connect. — E. M. Forster

If you pay attention to those aspects of God that demonstrate love, truth, beauty, intelligence, order, and spiritual evolution, those aspects will begin to expand in your life. Bit by bit, like a mosaic, disparate fragments of grace will merge to form a complete picture. Eventually this picture will replace the ore threatening one you have carried around inside you since infancy. — Deepak Chopra

Sometimes a glance, a few casual words, fragments of a melody floating through the quiet air of a summer evening, a book that accidentally comes into hands, a poem or memory-laden fragrance may bring about the impulse which changes and determines our whole life. — Anagarika Govinda

As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie. — Edith Wharton

The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places - under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary ... — Eric Gamalinda

This, I told myself, this is the way I shall be condemned to pass my days, turning over words, stray lines, fragments of memory, to see what might be lurking underneath them, as if they were so many flat stones, while I steadily faded. — John Banville

However, as every parent of a small child knows, converting a large object into small fragments is considerably easier than the reverse process. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Size me up and get goosebumps, boys. I'm the widowmaker and the slayer of jungles, the mean-eyed harbinger of desolation! I've ripped a catamount asunder and sprinkled his fragments in my stew; one screech from me makes vultures fly, one glance puts blisters on grizzly bears, devastation rides on my every breath! Where is that stately stag to stamp his hoof or rap his antlers to these proclamations! Where is the mangy lion what will lick the salt off my name! — Ron Hansen

Who knows, maybe one day there will no longer be Literature. Instead there will be literary web sites. Like those stars, still shining but long dead, the web sites will testify to the existence of past writers. There will be quotes, fragments of texts, which prove that there used to be complete texts once. Instead of readers there will be cyber space travelers who will stumble upon the websites by chance and stop for a moment to gaze at them. How they will read them? Like hieroglyphs? As we read the instructions for a dishwasher today? Or like remnants of a strange communication that meant something in the past, and was called Literature? — Dubravka Ugresic

The aesthetic discussion of photography is dominated by the concept of time. Photographs appear as devices stopping time and preserving fragments of the past, like flies in amber. — Peter Wollen

Sometimes he awoke with a feeling of fragments afloat in his sleep, but he couldn't seem to grasp them and put them together into something worthy of telling at the ritual. — Lois Lowry

And Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society, so near to suicide, is the end for which Providence has prepared man. If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite. — Russell Kirk

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments. — Virginia Woolf

The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful. — Jaron Lanier

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

She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it forever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. — E. M. Forster

Embracing and rejecting tradition, bound and liberated by faith, torn between obscurantism and reason, self-assured and self-critical, they were a kaleidoscope of fragments, positions held and abandoned, images formed and shattered, God-fearing Jew, God-denying Jew, passionate and indifferent, hero and villain, yea-sayer, nay-sayer. — Israel Shenker

Philip came gradually to know the people he was to live with, and by fragments of conversation, some of it not meant for his ears, learned a good deal both about himself and about his dead parents. Philip's father had been much younger than the Vicar of Blackstable. After — William Somerset Maugham

When you examine societies just as self-confident as ours that unraveled and were eventually swallowed by the jungle...you see that the balance between ecology and society is exquisitely delicate. If something throws that off, it all can end.

...Two thousand years later, someone will be squinting over the fragments, trying to find our what went wrong. — Arthur Demarest

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

The parallels to modern physics [with mysticism] appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan. — Fritjof Capra

Sciences usually advances by a succession of small steps, through a fog in which even the most keen-sighted explorer can seldom see more than a few paces ahead. Occasionally the fog lifts, an eminence is gained, and a wider stretch of territory can be surveyed-sometimes with startling results. A whole science may then seem to undergo a kaleidoscopic rearrangement, fragments of knowledge sometimes being found to fit together in a hitherto unsuspected manner. Sometimes the shock of readjustment may spread to other sciences; sometimes it may divert the whole current of human thought. — James Jeans

Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously. — George Eliot

The weathercocks on spires and housetops were mysterious with hints of stormy wind, and pointed, like so many ghostly fingers, out to dangerous seas, where fragments of great wrecks were drifting, perhaps, and helpless men were rocked upon them into a sleep as deep as the unfathomable waters. — Charles Dickens

It was but yesterday I thought myself a fragment quivering without rhythm in the sphere of life. Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me. — Kahlil Gibran

Judaism, Christianity & Islam are innovations on fragments from the periphery of the African cultural and spiritual system. — James Small

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

Radcliffe is the first important English novelist to use poetic epigraphs, interpolated poems, and poetic fragments decoratively, as it were, for their suggestive or mood-enhancing effects. (Matthew — Ann Radcliffe

What a strange joy it was to talk, to fish gleefully into the past and fling its fragments about us, with the unfailing aroma of pleasantness that pasts always seem to possess! — Anne Bosworth Greene

Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations. — Michael Ondaatje

Tis time, my friend, 'tis time! For rest the heart is aching; Days follow days in flight, and every day is taking Fragments of being, while together you and I Make plans to live. Look, all is dust, and we shall die. — Alexander Pushkin

He also keeps his silence when Bible passages become shredded to justify unwinding, and kids start to see the face of God in the fragments. — Neal Shusterman

The thought of how much happiness lay scattered across the universe, unrealized, in fragments, waiting for the right twist of fate to bring it together. — Leah Raeder

Claire closed her eyes. Her breathing got deeper. She was awake - she could still hear Lydia greedily thumbing through pages - but she was also asleep, and in that sleep, she felt herself dipping into a dream. There was no narrative, just fragments of a typical day. She was at her desk paying bills. She was practicing the piano. She was in the kitchen trying to come up with a grocery list. She was making phone calls to raise money for the Christmas toy drive. She was studying the shoes in her closet, trying to put together an outfit to wear to lunch. — Karin Slaughter

The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the break up of the self and, through the rearrangement and reassemble of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness, perfection, new meaning. — Heinz Kohut

If you're in the exorcism business, you must know a lot about demons." "Qliphoth," he says. "What?" "It's the proper word for what you call a demon. A demon is a bogeyman, an irrational entity representing fear in the collective unconscious. The Qliphoth are the castoffs of a greater entity. The old gods. They're dumb and their lack of intelligence makes them pure evil." "Okay, Daniel Webster. What happened at the exorcism?" Traven takes a breath and stares at his hands for a minute. "You should know that I don't follow the Church's standard exorcism rites. For instance, I seldom speak Latin. If Qliphoth really are lost fragments of the Angra Om Ya, the older dark gods, they're part of creatures millions of years old. Why would Latin have any effect on them? — Richard Kadrey

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

A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it
when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their mythology. — C. G. Jung

But the constant motion of the flames soon lulled him into a passive state where unrelated fragments of thoughts, sounds, images, and emotions drifted through him like snowflakes falling from a calm winter's sky. — Christopher Paolini

Evil gains work their punishment. — Sophocles

If [man] thinks of the totality as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate, but if he can include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border then his mind will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole. — David

- and there, on the table under her bedroom window, lies the voice that has set her dreaming again. Fragments of a life lived a long, long time ago. Across a hundred years the woman's voice speaks to her - so clearly that she cannot believe it is not possible to pick up her pen and answer. — Ahdaf Soueif

The music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head, dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being which cannot be secured until the last note is in place. — Russell Sherman

You can't stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It's overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad'dib hasn't the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there? — Frank Herbert

Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern. — Dawn Powell

Our fragments made us. — Margaret Atwood

Talk - half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman - like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again. — Anais Nin

As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did. — Bruno Schulz

Winter came early that year. Snow filled the gray December air like fragments of torn-up hope — Philip Kerr

The wise man, the true friend, the finished character, we seek everywhere, and only find in fragments. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

it's only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my once considerable mental powers I still possess! — Arthur C. Clarke

I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest. — Umberto Eco

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution. — Henry Louis Gates

Each form is inadequate, like a graft to be rejected by its intractable and unrelenting host and thus can only serve a brief and momentary purpose coherent to a context rooted in contiguous reason. This unbridled brash Spirit is, to itself, burdensome, yet dynamic, for it sees no flaw in working within the confines of a closed system to achieve ends that extend beyond it. This Spirit is, in fact, self-deceptive for to achieve such ends, it becomes necessary to bound manipulable fragments of the Self with a twine by which these parts can be joined indissolubly and maneuvered adroitly with the skill of a marionettist. — Ashim Shanker

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

I don't have to smile and pretend I'm fine even though inside I feel like I'm breaking into a thousand tiny fragments too small ever to be put together again. — Sarah Darer Littman

What really interests me about capturing and suspending movement is that I get to experience something invisible and inaudible, as elusive and fleeting as thought itself, and give it form ... Maybe my paintings are all just little fragments of the Cosmic Dance suspended in time. — James Nares

The cosmos exploded, actualizing its potentiality of space and time. The centers of power, like fragments of a bursting bomb, were hurled apart. But each one retained in itself, as a memory and a longing, the single point of the whole; and each mirrored in itself aspects of all the others throughout all the cosmical space and time. — Olaf Stapledon

The world is just going to continue to fragment, and that's a great thing. — John Vanderslice

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

In our day, we thought that the bards would sing of us for generations to come, but we did not believe it. But in fact Arthur now occupies a higher throne than he ever did when he was alive. The fragments of all our lives have been put together to form legend. Camelot has become the nursery of Britain: the glorious past that never was and always will be. — Clara Winter

Like any collection of family photographs, it was a random selection that told only fragments of a story. The real tale would be revealed by the pictures that were missing or never even taken at all, not the ones that had been so carefully framed or packed away neatly in an envelope. — Victoria Hislop

And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. — Umberto Eco

Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Calvino remembered he had no food in the house and would have to go shopping on Sukhumvit Road. Then he planned to crawl into his bed and sleep, the kind of deep sleep without dreams or hopes, a sleep without regrets, without knowing or thinking how things got the way they are or how occasional fragments of decency escaped the forces of gravity. — Christopher G. Moore

Nietzsche is absolutely correct, even more correct today than when he wrote it in Thus Spake Zarathustra: I looked all about me for human beings but all I saw were fragments, deformed creatures with too much eye or too much ear. This is what the modern culture of specialized intellect-the kind of one-sidedness that banausic utilitarianism alone can value-works so hard to produce. — Kenny Smith

The vast results obtained by Science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes other than those which are practicedby every one of us, in the humblest and meanest affairs of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. — Thomas Huxley

I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end. — T. S. Eliot

But the sun will rise the day after tomorrow
A millennium without us silences our last echo
To tiny fragments even our plastics are reduced
In Eden Reincarnate all life but ours is renewed — A.A. Patawaran

His prime resource is the leaky vessel of is own memory. At times he views it thus, quite literally- as some old pail with holes and rusted seams. Alternatively, he imagines an extensive manuscript of which there survive only a handful of charred fragments; it is like trying to piece together the Gospels from the Dead Sea Scrolls ... — Penelope Lively

Despite my lifetime of declining rich desserts, my evenings spent jogging, regardless of all my careful moderation and self-discipline - I'm trapped, wadded inside a shell of steel and aluminum. My body, violated in countless places by fragments of broken glass. My low-cholesterol blood rushes to abandon me in hot, leaping spurts. Despite all my care, the heart-attack victim and I will both be just as dead. — Chuck Palahniuk

It is easy to forget the decadence of glass. How some of us find it only in fragments. The glass between us and the world is often the measure of our wealth. Looking out at the world through it colors the hunger beyond. — Chris Abani

Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves-apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge-and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers-but not to us as psychologists-because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study. — Marvin Minsky

I guess when you loved someone, you were willing to accept all the pieces and factors and fragments that made them up, the sum of those adding up to the whole, and you were left with no choice but to wholly accept the total of that creation. — A.L. Jackson

But my life, oh, my life, had been a constant search for an enormous dream in which my fellow creatures and animals, plants, chimeras, stars, and minerals were in a pre-established harmony, a dream that is forgotten because it must be forgotten, and is sought desperately, and only sporadically does one find its tragic fragments in the warmth of a person, in some specific situation, a glance - in memory too, of course, in some specific pain, some moment. I loved that harmony with a passion; I loved it in voices, voices. And then, instead of harmony, there was nothing but scraps and tatters. And perhaps that alone is what it means to be a poet. — Aleksander Wat

I know this hasn't been a seamless narrative. I've had to shatter the story and string its fragments out along a death lasting decades. — Peter Watts

For Saffron," it said in shaky old writing on the damaged base, and on the other side, "Saffy's angel."
Saffron, picking up the broken fragments one by one, said it didn't matter. She hugged Rose and Indigo and Caddy and Sarah, and said again and again that it didn't matter, it didn't matter at all. — Hilary McKay

It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only. — Virginia Woolf

Today's news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated evens of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes wither of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity's tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes. — R. Buckminster Fuller

Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society. — Thomas Sowell

Movies are a world of Fragments. — Jean-Luc Godard

I'll put my hand in no man's hand,' said Mr. Micawber, gasping, puffing, and sobbing, to that degree that he was like a man fighting with cold water, 'until I have - blown to fragments - the - a - detestable - serpent - HEEP! I'll partake of no one's hospitality, until I have - a - moved Mount Vesuvius - to eruption - on - a - the abandoned rascal - HEEP! Refreshment - a - underneath this roof - particularly punch - would - a - choke me - unless - I had - previously - choked the eyes - out of the head - a - of - interminable cheat, and liar - HEEP! I - a - I'll know nobody - and - a - say nothing - and - a - live nowhere - until I have crushed - to - a - undiscoverable atoms - the - transcendent and immortal hypocrite and perjurer - HEEP! — Charles Dickens

The sound she is making is the sound hearts make after they're in
pieces and the fragments dissolve into the overwhelming sadness of the
universe. The power to hear it may be the only privilege of the
thoroughly dispossessed. — John Burdett

I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I'm sorry there is so much pain in this story. I'm sorry it's in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it. — Margaret Atwood