Logo - Feel The Words

Fragmentary Quotes

Lines about things left broken, partial, and unfinished.

These fragmentary quotes gather thoughts on things that survive only in pieces, from a dinosaur film once thought lost to poems built from disjointed lines. Writers here treat incompleteness as its own kind of honesty, much like reflections found in Art quotes.

1925's 'The Lost World' is... really, everything a dinosaur movie should be. Like a dinosaur, this classic was once extinct too, existing as mere fragmentary footage and stills, but cinemaphile fossil-hunters have painstakingly excavated bits and pieces from obscure archives...

Quotes by Kage Baker

A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each one of which is empirically true. And this is the reason for the fragmentary character of those poems.

Quotes by George Oppen

Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often...

Quotes by Franklin Foer

I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that,...

Quotes by Floyd Skloot

Ability Quotes

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.

Quotes by Dominic Grieve

The kind of improv that I'm particularly addicted to is the kind that... aims at creating a momentary, fragmentary experience that has a totality to it. It's kind of like fireworks. It's the more ephemeral of art forms - once...

Quotes by Del Close

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the...

Quotes by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Frequently Asked Questions

What do fragmentary quotes usually describe?
They describe things that survive only in pieces, like early film footage that outlasted the rest of a lost movie, or a series of poems whose broken structure mirrors an idea being expressed.
Why would a memory be called fragmentary?
Because memory rarely arrives whole; one quote here frames memory as fundamental to identity yet elusive and ever-changing, so calling it fragmentary captures how selectively we actually recall things.
Do these quotes only apply to art and film?
No, one quote applies the idea to technology, describing DNS databases that hold only fragmentary histories of network traffic, useful for cataloging malicious activity even though the record is incomplete.
Is there a quote about a specific classic film?
Yes, one references 1925's 'The Lost World,' noting the film itself was once nearly extinct, surviving mainly as fragmentary footage and stills before being restored for later audiences.
Where can I read more quotes on related themes?
Try Art quotes for more on incomplete creative works, or Ability quotes for lines about working with what's actually available.

Whether describing a memory that keeps slipping or a database holding only scraps of a bigger picture, these lines show how fragments still tell a story. Pair them with Ability quotes for more on working within limits.