Quotes About Fragments

He was a boy composed of pieces just loosely held together, and the centrifugal spin of this latest terror could pull his loose bits apart. No magical belief in hummingbirds and glowworms could put him back together if that happened

That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments - I say a thousand, but they may only have been nine hundred. I did not count them.

I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my student to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one.

our brains are minuscule fragments of the universe, much too small to hold all the facts of the world but not too idle to speculate about them.

Libraries keep the records on behalf of all humanity. ... the unique and the absurd, the wise and the fragments of stupidity.

The depthless postmodern surface incorporates fragments of once-meaningful codes and conventions that are now blankly cited without context or referent. The result is not a coherent aesthetic structure but an opaque and resistant pastiche.

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces.

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall.

Was im großen Hotel erlebt wird, das sind keine runden, vollen, abgeschlossenen Schicksale. Es sind nur Bruchstücke, Fetzen, Teile; hinter den Türen wohnen Menschen, gleichgültige oder merkwürdige, Menschen im Aufstieg, Menschen im Niedergang; Glückseligkeiten und Katastrophen wohnen Wand an Wand. Die Drehtür dreht sich, und was zwischen Ankunft und Abreise erlebt wird, das ist nichts Ganzes" (S. 309)

To borrow Julia Creet's phrase, maybe "memory is where we have arrived rather than where we have left." ... I used to think I was a transcriber of my own experiences and memories, adding an image here and there, but now I think I am more of a shaper. I take small fragments of image, memory, silence, and thought, and shape them with imagninary hands into something different.

It may have been in pieces, but I gave you the best of me.

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....

about how we are all "emigrants from a country we remember too little of," how important to us are the fragments we do remember clearly and how we spend our time trying to reconstruct ourselves from these.

This is a cardboard universe, and if you lean too long or too heavily against it, you fall through.

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

Maybe there is hope in the fragments, that what is lost can always be filled in by someone who knows.

I collected their papers. The ones that blew into Brooklyn. They were just there at first. I didn't even know what they were. But once I did, I went all over the place, picking them up. I don't know what to do with them. I mean, they're meaningless now, but they still exist. You can't throw out something like that. You can't make them gone like that.

We melt; we tear and rip apart. Membrane, baby. Cellophane. Ain't that some shit.

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

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.

These are the incongruities of memory. It is hard to hold on to the entirety of something, but pieces may be held up to light.

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.

Outlines can help, but not if you begin with them. If you begin, instead, by writing down everything, by spewing out your ideas as fast as you can type, you will discover the answer to the first question: the fragments you have to work with are the various things you have just written.

The true legends are the broken ones: fragments of histories, tellings, embellishments, edits and re-edits. Truth abhors a narrative.