A Quote by Tim O'Brien

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

Tim O'Brien

Quote Topics

Beginning End Fragments Little Memory Odd Often Sticks Those

Quote Author

Tim O'Brien
American - Novelist
Born: October 1, 1946

In the camp, this meant committing my verse-many thousands of lines-to memory. To help me with this I improvised decimal counting beads and, in transit prisons, broke up matchsticks and used the fragments as tallies. As I approached the end of my sentences I grew more confident of my powers of memory, and began writing down and memorizing prose-dialogue at first, but then, bit by bit, whole densely written passages. My memory found room for them! It worked. But more and more of my time-in the end as much as one week every month-went into the regular repetition of all I had memorized.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting.

Gunter Grass

The end of 'The End' is the best place to begin 'The End', because if you read 'The End' from the beginning of the beginning of 'The End' to the end of the end of 'The End', you will arrive at the end.

Daniel Handler

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.

Northrop Frye

Those final weeks, spanning end of summer and the beginning of another autumn, are blurred in memory, perhaps because our understanding of each other had reached that sweet depth where two people communicate more often in silence than in words: an affectionate quietness replaces the tensions, the unrelaxed chatter and chasing about that produce a friendship’s more showy, more, in the surface sense, dramatic moments.

Truman Capote

It's strange, 'cause a play, you start at the beginning and you go all the way through to the end. So it's naturally very well rehearsed and you get a rhythm and a flow. In film, you can shoot the ending before the beginning. It's very odd. And it's like a craft you have to learn.

Judd Nelson

Somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive. It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted.

Melina Marchetta

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

T. S. Eliot

Moviemaking is a time machine: narrative spliced into fragments and reassembled into a constant present, the end of a story shot before the beginning, which is shot after the middle.

Steve Erickson

The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

Elie Wiesel

It must be an odd feeling to be thankful to nobody in particular. Christians in public institutions often see this odd thing happening on Thanksgiving Day. Everyone in the institution seems to be thankful 'in general.' It's very strange. It's a little like being married in general.

Cornelius Plantinga

Writing a TV show is totally different than writing features, or just, what I started doing is writing features. You write a little bit more organically. You start from the beginning to the end, beginning, middle and end.

David Labrava

It is so often the odd, the unexpected, the apparently trifling, that stamps itself upon the memory for ever, while much more memorable things pass away like a breath of wind.

Esther Meynell

I mean, there's little enough in this life, really, and you only find it worth living for the odd moments, and if you think you're going to have those odd moments again, then it makes life wonderful and have a meaning.