Fragments Quotes

• What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.

  Tim O'Brien

  Memories, Littles, Sticks

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.34, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

  Tobias Wolff

  Support, Brilliant, Stills

  Tobias Wolff (2004). “Old School”, p.8, Vintage

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• We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets - we remember only.

  Henry Miller

  Music, Ideas, Mind

  Henry Miller (1959). “The Henry Miller Reader”, p.9, New Directions Publishing

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• Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Truth

  Henry Ward Beecher, Truman Jeremiah Ellinwood (1871). “The original Plymouth pulpit”

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• So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

  Amy Tan

  Forever, Way, Mysterious

  Amy Tan (2001). “The Bonesetter's Daughter”, p.248, Penguin

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• 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

  Mean, Mind, Different

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Art, Flower, Wells

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Pincus-Witten, Hirschl & Adler Galleries (1986). “Georgia O'Keeffe: selected paintings and works on paper : April 26 through June 6, 1986”, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Incorporated

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• These fragments I have shored against my ruins

  T. S. Eliot

  Age, Ruins, Nostalgia

  The Waste Land l. 431 (1922)

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• Some things remain fragments, just the lyrics and melodies or a line or two or a verse.

  Tracy Chapman

  Two, Lines, Melody

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Kind, Modern

  Source: ctheory.net

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• Enormous enlargements of an object or a fragment give it a personality it never had before, and in this way, it can become a vehicle of entirely new lyric and plastic power.

  Fernand Leger

  Giving, Personality, Enlargement

  Fernand Léger, Katharine Kuh (1953). “Léger: Catalogue of Th Exhibition Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in Collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Art”

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• We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments.

  Virginia Woolf

  Reconcile, Seasons

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.231, Broadview Press

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• Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

  Derek Walcott

  Strong Love, Stronger, Broken Pieces

  Derek Walcott (2014). “What the Twilight Says: Essays”, p.69, Macmillan

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• God, it was good to let go, let the tight mask fall off, and the bewildered, chaotic fragments pour out. It was the purge, the catharsis.

  Sylvia Plath

  Letting Go, Fall, Catharsis

  Sylvia Plath (2007). “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.152, Anchor

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• Whatever you can conceive or imagine is but a fragment of yourself.

  Hakuun Yasutani

  Spiritual, Imagine

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

  Dawn Powell

  Love, Beautiful, Mosaics

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• All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.

  Paul Klee

  Art, Memories, Dark

  Paul Klee (1967). “Paul Klee, 1879-1940: A Retrospective Exhibition”

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• Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality - collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.

  Toni Morrison

  Quilts, Reality, Cells

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• 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

  Photography, Past, Stopping

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• Novel-writing is a highly skilled and laborious trade. One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smoldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them.

  Evelyn Waugh

  Writing, Dust, Order

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• Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

  Jasper Johns

  Mind, Consciousness, Intention

  Kirk Varnedoe, Jasper Johns (1996). “Jasper Johns: A Retrospective”

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• All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ocean, Humility, Glimpse

  Ursula K. Le Guin (2016). “The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin”, p.295, Simon and Schuster

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• No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

  William Osler

  Life, Humility, Men

  Sir William Osler (2001). “Osler's "a Way of Life" and Other Addresses, with Commentary and Annotations”, p.337, Duke University Press

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• Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today.

  David Bohm

  Essence, Live For Today, Growing

  David Bohm (2005). “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”, p.2, Routledge

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• Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.

  Virginia Woolf

  Running, Memories, Wind

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.436, Wordsworth Editions

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