Fragments Quotes - Page 14

• It is only now, these years later, that Rahel with adult hindsight recognized the sweetness of that gesture. A grown man entertaining three raccoons, treating them like real ladies. Instinctively colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness. Or affection. It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.

  Arundhati Roy

  Dream, Real, Men

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• You probably think that being a guest in your aunt's house I would hesitate to butter you all over the front lawn and dance on the fragments in hobnailed boots, but you are mistaken. It would be a genuine pleasure. By an odd coincidence I brought a pair of hobnailed boots with me!' So saying, and recognising a good exit line when he saw one, he strode out, and after an interval of tense meditation I followed him. (Spode to Wooster)

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Aunt, Thinking, House

  P.G. Wodehouse (2000). “Jeeves And The Tie That Binds”, p.74, Simon and Schuster

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• The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.

  Louis Agassiz

  Children, Science, Hands

  Louis Agassiz (1873). “Geological Sketches”, p.11

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• Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall; that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you; That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.

  Will Durant

  Song, Strong, Fall

  Will Durant (2012). “Story of Philosophy”, p.5, Simon and Schuster

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• The emphasis has been on rights, not responsibilities. When it comes to piecing together the fragments of broken lives, we have tended to place the entire burden on the state and its agencies.

  Jonathan Sacks

  Responsibility, Agency, Rights

  "Democratized Holiness: Yom Kippur And Moral Responsibility" by Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 6, 2011.

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• Photography makes one conscious of beauty everywhere, even in the simplest things, even in what is often considered commonplace or ugly. Yet nothing is really 'ordinary', for every fragment of the world is crowned with wonder and mystery, and a great and surprising beauty.

  Alvin Langdon Coburn

  Photography, Beauty Everywhere, Ordinary

  Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alison Gernsheim (1978). “Alvin Langdon Coburn, Photographer: An Autobiography with Over 70 Reproductions of His Works”, p.80, Courier Corporation

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• Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.

  Walter Lippmann

  Exercise, Government, Minorities

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• I have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children.

  Edwin A. Abbott

  Children, Husband, Half

  Edwin A. Abbott (2015). “Flatland”, p.15, Xist Publishing

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• There is not a fragment in all nature, for every relative fragment of one thing is a full harmonious unit in itself.

  John Muir

  Unity, Yosemite, Units

  John Muir (2015). “John Muir’s Incredible Travel Memoirs: A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, My First Summer in the Sierra, The Mountains of California, Travels in Alaska, Steep Trails… (Illustrated): Adventure Memoirs & Wilderness Studies from the Naturalist, Environmental Philosopher and Early Advocate of Preservation of Wilderness, the Author of The Yosemite and Picturesque California”, p.84, e-artnow

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• Since every building and designed object is made of memory, every place can become a memorial for re-membering our lives and the world around us... a place to recollect the fragments of our lives into a revitalized whole.

  Anthony Lawlor

  Memories, Memorial, World

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• Laziness is the one divine fragment of a godlike existence left to man from paradise.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Men, Laziness, Paradise

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• Now shall I become a common tale, A ruin'd fragment of a worn-out world; Unchanging record of unceasing change. Eternal landmark to the tide of time. Swift generations, that forget each other, Shall still keep up the memory of my shame Till I am grown an unbelieved fable.

  Hartley Coleridge

  Memories, Generations, Records

  Hartley Coleridge, Derwent Coleridge (1851). “Poems”, p.272

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• Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something-an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man's, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Struggle, Men, Air

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2007). “The Great Gatsby”, p.127, Broadview Press

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• Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

  Maria Popova

  Motivational, Order, Ideas

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• If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilizations escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.

  Russell Kirk

  Order, Civilization, Ideas

  Russell Kirk (2001). “The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot”, p.11, Regnery Publishing

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• She put a hit on her boyfriend, so it's not like she hasn't murdered someone." "And you know that how?" Sam asks. I'm trying really hard to be honest, but telling the whole thing to Sam seems beyond me. Still, the fragments sound ridiculous on their own. "She said so. In the park." He rolls his eyes. "Because the two of you were so friendly." "I guess she mistook me for someone else." I sound so much like Philip that it scares me. I can hear the menace in my tone. "Who?" Sam asks, not flinching. I force my voice back to normal. "Uh, the person who killed him.

  Holly Black

  Eye, Two, Voice

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• Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).

  Vladimir Lenin

  Independent, Curves, Class

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• Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.

  Haruki Murakami

  Twilight, Tiny, Consciousness

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• We fell silent again. The thing we had shared was nothing more than a fragment of time that had died longe ago.Even so, a faint glimmer of that warm memory still claimed a part of my heart. And when death claim me, no doubt I would walk along by that faint light in the brief instant before being flung once again into the abyss of nothingness

  Haruki Murakami

  Memories, Heart, Light

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• I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

  Ben Lerner

  Thinking, Knowing, Fiction

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• the ice was not only broken; it was shivered into a million fragments

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Ice, Broken, Millions

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• Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

  David Mitchell

  Keys, Order, Color

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.445, Random House

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• Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me. There is something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the Universal spirit.Don't you feel that?

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Sublime, Tiny, Spirit

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1991). “Cancer Ward: A Novel”, p.584, Macmillan

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• I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

  Paul Auster

  Winter, Thinking, Stories

  Time Out Interview, www.timeout.com.

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• I am a fragment of a mirror whose whole design and shape I do not know. Nevertheless, with what I have - I can reflect light into the dark places of this world - into the black places in the hearts of men - and change somethings in some people. Perhaps others may see and do likewise. This is what I am about. This is the meaning of my life.

  Robert Fulghum

  Heart, Dark, Men

  Robert Fulghum (1999). “Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, p.99, Dramatic Publishing

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