Quotes About Fragmentary

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Intelligence is fragmentary and hard to discover, so it is by joining forces and sharing information with our allies that we maximise our ability to protect ourselves.

There were lots of ominous sports metaphors in the fragmentary intercept reports. The score was going to be 200 to nothing. The Olympics were coming.18

The secrecy that surrounds any CIA operation makes complete documentation impossible, but the fragmentary information that is now available permits identification of several important examples.

Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, particularly when she had to exert herself in any way, either to move, to count money, or to choose a turning. To know the truth--to accept without bitterness-- those, perhaps, were the most articulate of her utterances, for no one could have made head or tail of the queer gibberish murmured in front of the statue of Francis, Duke of Bedford...

The strict competences of independence, the formal mastery, the complexities of attitude and know-how necessary to life on the farm, which have been in the making in the race of farmers since before history, all are replaced by the knowledge of some fragmentary task that may be learned by rote in a little while.

Sleep takes her down fast, and very deep, whirls her through places too fragmentary to call dreams, then spits her abruptly back to the surface.

One day perhaps, when the records of the twentieth century AD have grown as fragmentary as those of ancient Rome, a history of the Second World War will be written that relies solely upon the broadcasts of Hitler and the memoirs of Churchill. It will be one cut off from whole dimensions of experience: no letters from the front, no combatants' diaries.

But she was wrong; it was what gave her away; she had not taken into account that this fragmentary detail of the truth had sharp edges which could not be made to fit in, except to those contiguous fragments of the truth from which she had arbitrarily detached it, edges which, whatever the fictitious details in which she might embed it, would continue to shew, by their overlapping angles and by the gaps which she had forgotten to fill, that its proper place was elsewhere.

Before getting into the carriage I had composed the seascape for which I was going to look out, which I had hoped to see with the 'sun radiant' upon it, and which at Balbec I could distinguish only in too fragmentary a form, broken by so many vulgar intromissions that had no place in my dream, bathers, dressing-boxes, pleasure yachts.

We have of the universe only inchoate, fragmentary visions, which we complement by arbitrary associations of ideas, creative of dangerous illusions.

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing more definitely than one disappears in the tomb.