Quotes About Fragments

And you are pieced together bit by bit Set against the evening Lovely and glowing, like a chain of gold. — Philip Larkin, from "(A Study in Light and Dark)," The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin , ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

He reached into the grate, picked out a couple of scraps, smoothed them out, leaning close to the flickering light. He was curious to see what it was Zoia had decided to destroy.

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

Lì, accatastati, coperti da un cellophane appannato, ci sono i resti dell'estate: un tavolino pieghevole, qualche sedia bianca, vasi di fiori ormai secchi

Like language, books serve to express us, but also to complete us, furnishing, through a variety of excerpted and reworked fragments, the missing elements of our personality.

We might use the term inner library to characterize that set of books . . . around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person's individual relationship to books and to other people. Specific titles figure in these private libraries, but . . . they are primarily composed of fragments of forgotten and imaginary books through which we apprehend the world.

There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild-they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scatterd in the wind-but this only made him more determined to hold onto what little of her he still had.

Some of the names I could not reason, like the box marked DARKNESS, or the one with DEATH OF THE FIRSTBORN written in pencil on its front. I noticed that there was a box on the top of one of these skyscrapers of boxes that was marked DUST

When the clocks of midnight squander a generous time, I will go further than Ulysses' oarsmen to the realm of dreams, inaccessible to human nature. From that underwater region, I rescue fragments that I do not begin to understand.

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.

Thus, it is the task of man to redeem these shattered fragments, or sparks, to find in them their higher significance, and to restore them to their divine origin.

The fragments for the past, for me, are not without life.

If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.

All really good writers use fragments.

Si le damos la vuelta al nido ni un solo huevo quedará intacto, aunque puede que las grietas no sean visibles.

The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga.

Take away man from his natural surroundings, from the fulness of his communal life, with all its living associations of beauty and love and social obligations, and you will be able to turn him into so many fragments of a machine for the production of wealth on a gigantic scale. Turn a tree into a log and it will burn for you, but it will never bear living flowers and fruit.

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.

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.

My impression was, he's walking as though he's made of glass, and if you should touch him he would just shatter apart. I don't know if it was an act or what, but it sure was effective.

He smelled of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages. He was something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass. But he was alive, puling like a babe, and shriveling unto death, fast, very fast, before their eyes.

I lie here sleeping, and these people are the fragments of my bloodless dreaming.

There were fireworks the very first night, things that you should be afraid of perhaps, for they might remind you of other more horrible things, but these were beautiful, rockets that ascended into the ancient soft air of Mexico and shook the stars apart in blue and white fragments.

Untitled Either a snail's moist web of moonlight, or someone's hot breath at four a.m. when the night has been too much, has eaten you whole. This is my life. It has been sifted through the bones of my body, through blood. It is all that I have.