Fragments

Donald Barthelme, in See the Moon?, in 1968:

Fragments are the only forms I trust.

Italo Calvino, in If on a Winter’s Night, a Traveller, in 1979:

…the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Gordon Burn, in Born Yesterday from 2008, writing about the erstwhile Eastenders actress Susan Tully:

A colleague had logged her onto YouTube for the first time that very afternoon, and the fact that just tapping the words ‘Michelle Fowler’ into the thing could back so many moment of the past crowding back – a pandemonium of fragments (an aggregation of fragments is the only kind of whole we have now)…

Jaron Lanier, in You are not a Gadget in 2010:

Instead of people being treated as the sources of their own creativity, commercial aggregation and abstraction sites presented anonymized fragments of creativity as products that might have fallen from the sty or been dug up from the ground, obscuring the true sources.

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