Quotes About Fragment

They stood in reverential quiet, as they did most visits, but Mara heard Lillian whisper a fragment of an Emily Dickinson poem: From Cocoon forth a Butterfly As Lady from her Door Mara

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.

This is an act of destruction of the self, an undoing of the self's protection. Over and over I face the wall, the way in which I must confront my own complicity. Even the smallest fragment is a great victory.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

The first lesson that the sages of the Upanishads teach their selected pupils is the inadequacy of the intellect. How can this feeble brain, that aches at a little calculus, ever hope to understand the complex immensity of which it is so transitory a fragment?

What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified .

Jeffersonian democracy, faulty as it is, and only the fragment of it that we have, is a thing of such preciousness, a thing of such value.

Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.

The fragment is like a broken mirror - ideas don't have the time to reflect themselves in it or, as a result, to feel sorry for themselves. They run ahead of their shadows or their reflections. To run ahead is to move towards an unforeseeable outcome, but one whose path is made for it in advance. Birds too run ahead of those who see them. The event also runs ahead of history. It is what opens up untimely perspectives in a world brought totally up to date.

Thought too must fragment and scatter. Thought is a spectrum, and truth, if it exists, can only show through anagrammatically in the spectrum of thought.

What seems distinctively modern as a unit of thought, of art, of discourse is the fragment; and the quotation is one kind of fragment.

He still had a fragment of his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelligence and importance.

The idea, so common in the ancient writers, is not all a poetic conceit, that the soul of a man is only a fragment of a larger whole, and goes out in search of other souls in which it will find its true completion. We walk among worlds unrealized, until we have learned the secret of love. We know this, and in our sincerest moments admit this, even though we are seeking to fill up our lives with other ambitions and other hopes.

she tried instead to summon up the sixteen-o'clock dream. Something flying. Dashing, darting, weaving between the concrete behemoths of the arcologies and co-habs … she closed her eyes, tried to persuade her imagination into creating a flying something that might complete her fragment of a dream. And the window wall of her thirty-third-level apartment exploded.

NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word nothing were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune.

At the kernel of every promise, there is always a little doubt, like a fragment of shell that clings to the broken nut.

A Fragment of Fear, a 1965 novel by John Bingham.

Now, the neighborhood of Maple Dell was more like a development than anything else in Shady Hill. It was the kind of place where the houses stand cheek by jowl, all of them white frame, all of them built twenty years ago, and parked beside each was a car that seemed more substantial than the house itself, as if this were a fragment of some nomadic culture.

A single photograph is a mere fragment of an experience and, simultaneously, the distillation of the entire body of one's experience.

It was like every attitude or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination...

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.

Adam said, "Well, you can keep it warm," and he continued, "Old Sam Hamilton saw this coming. He said there couldn't be any more universal philosophers. The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb. He saw a time when one man would know only one little fragment, but he would know it well." "Yes," Lee said from the doorway, "and he deplored it. He hated it." "Did he now?" Adam asked.

If only simplicity were not the most difficult of all things. It consists of watching objectively the development of any fragment of fantasy.