Fracture Broken Quotes

After a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures can never be anything but broken.

Mister Teatime had a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something that was broken.

That’s not the same. What happened to you, to your species, it’s . . . it doesn’t even compare.’ ‘Why? Because it’s worse?’ She nodded. ‘But it still compares. If you have a fractured bone, and I’ve broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?

Broken vows are like broken mirrors. They leave those who held to them bleeding and staring at fractured images of themselves. (pg. 161)

Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn't alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edgesof her heart, she was sure of it.

The world is full of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can't mend fractured hearts, wounded hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.

I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bare. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people, that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street, pushing carts. You see them in the faces of the regulars at the bar.

Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world. And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we’re closer to gods than we know.

an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.

Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf. In sleep, these broken floes drift toward the morning light of remembrance.

You can see the fracture lines in people sometimes, if you search hard enough. You can see where they’ve broken and tried to mend themselves.

I was in fractures before. I am in fractures now. But the pieces still form the same broken picture.

His steady gaze was even softer than his voice. It reached out to the broken parts of her like a caress. The type of touch that moves through damaged flesh, past fractured bones and into a person's wounded soul.

Don't ever tell me I'm broken if you will not be the glue, and please don't point out the fractures if that's all you're allowed to do.

Those look like broken ribs," Hunt said wryly. "Definitely broken ribs, Athalar," Bryce replied, sitting back on her heels. "And a broken arm, from the way he's cradling it." "Skull fracture's healed," Hunt observed with equal distance, as if they were on one of his favorite Vanir crime show procedurals. Ithan's eyes flashed again. "I'm sensing hostility and a good dose of male pride," Bryce said. "Throw in some stubbornness and I'd say we've got a classic case of stupidity," Hunt answered. "What the fuck is wrong with you two?" Ithan demanded.

Perhaps it was truly a funny thing not to realize how broken or damaged you were until someone came along and picked up every single fractured piece and showed you how just being you was enough.

A fractured team is just like a broken arm or leg; fixing it is always painful, and sometimes you have to rebreak it to make it heal correctly. And the rebreak hurts a lot more than the initial break, because you have to do it on purpose P.37

[...] the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.

Then give me all of you, every last jagged fractured piece. Give me all of it, Faye, because those pieces you think are broken? They complete me.

The rage of the Beast Lord was a terrible thing to behold. Some people stormed, some punched things, but Curran slipped into this icy, bone-chilling calm. His face hardened into a flat mask, and his eyes turned into a molten inferno of pure gold. If you looked at it for longer than two seconds, your muscles locked, your knees shook, and you had to fight to keep from cringing. It was easier to look at the floor, but I didn’t. Besides, he wasn’t angry with me. He wasn’t even angry with Kate. He was angry with Anapa. I had no doubt that if he could’ve gotten a hold of the god at that moment, he would’ve broken him in half. “It’s only ribs,” Kate told him. “And they’re not even broken. They are fractured.” “And the hip,” Doolittle said. “And the knee.” There you go. Don’t expect mercy from a honeybadger. “How long do you need to keep her?” Curran looked to Doolittle. “She can go to her quarters, provided she doesn’t leave them,” Doolittle said. “I can’t do anything else with the magic down. She must stay down until I can patch her up.” “She will.” Curran reached for Kate. “Hey, baby. Ready?” She nodded. Curran slid his hands under her and picked her up, gently, as if she weighed nothing. “Good?” he asked. She put her arm around him. “Never better.

A heart with so many stress fractures would never be anything but broken.

...a truly brilliant mind, but it was brilliant like a fractured mirror, all marvellous facets and rainbows but, ultimately, also something was broken.

When you haven’t yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn’t about death and rebirth. It’s about life and more life. It’s about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things. But when you’ve faced some kind of death— the loss of someone you loved dearly, the failure of a dream, the fracture of a relationship— that’s when you start understanding the central metaphor. When your life is easy, a lot of the really crucial parts of Christian doctrine and life are nice theories, but you don’t really need them. When, however, death of any kind is staring you in the face, all of a sudden rebirth and new life are very, very important to you.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

We were a storm together; uncontrollable and ferocious. We were perfect.

Life is often absurd; all you can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, looking for the joke in things – because there is always a joke, even if it’s bitter and sour – hoping for the best and trying not to be too broken when it doesn’t happen.   

Take me back," I tell him, shifting a little. The world tilts and steadies all at once. "Alert the medics and have a bed prepared for our arrival. In the meantime, elevate my arm and continue applying direct pressure to the wound. The bullet has broken or fractured something, and this will require surgery.

Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture. But this one? He'd watched her. Studied her. Observed what maybe even Uncle, the reader of people, had missed. This one was already fractured, and the lines between her broken pieces were not fissures but scar material stronger than whatever had once filled those spaces.

I need to know why I’m so broken, so I can fix myself. One way or another. Maybe this place can help me do that, and then I can finally look forward to my future. Because I’m starting to realize there’s something worse than stepping up and facing your fears – and that’s living as if you’re already dead.

Yes,” Abelard said finally. “You are a fractured snowflake, a pattern repeated in infinite detail in a world full of salt crystals. You’re not broken—you’re perfect.” Perfect. Some tight, hard shell around my heart cracked open. I hadn’t even known I’d walled my heart away from this terrible world.

Our hearts may have broken in Nebraska but in Colorado they split open along the fractures, crumble to pieces, blow away. The peaks and green valleys, the lakes set at the foot of mountains like offerings. Beautiful and doomed and thus terrible.

The world was full of broken people, and all the hospitals and institutions and jails could never mend their fractured hearts, wounded minds, and trampled spirits.

Samkiel was who I was, who I would forever be, and Liam died with whatever part of Dianna’s heart fractured that night.

She ran straight for me like I’m her goddamn savior. Like I’m capable of fixing everything. Like I’m capable of protecting her. Like I’m whole enough to help fill in the broken, fractured pieces of her, too. And then she went and held me in her arms like that. Fuck.

Every relationship worth keeping sustains, at the very least, splintered glazes, hairline fractures, cracks. And aren’t these flaws the prerequisites of intimacy?

We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

We humans have always been in pain. History tells us that in the artifacts civilizations have left behind. Pain is there in the broken vases, the fractured poetry, the overwhelming music we have played for centuries. We belong to grief until the engine goes out. Then we belong to the dirt, our bodies identical to other fallen things.

This is a book about fracture. About the experiences that make up a life. About the pieces of me. Delving into naked emotion is a terrifying proposition. Digging into our souls to look for answers that may not be there is a ledge most of us avoid. And yet, here I am.

I felt his pain as my own and I wanted to touch him, feel him, reach inside his fractured heart and pull out all of the love he buried inside. I wanted to kiss every inch of his skin. I wanted to feel his brokenness against mine, like if we held each other hard enough something within each of us would finally heal.

Language falters in the abyss; it fractures at the site of trauma. We need to find a different way of speaking from the depths, reclaiming the notion that language about God is always fractured language, always broken, and never complete.

Cure dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks and seams. Its promises hold power precisely because none of us want to be broken. But I'm curious: what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness?

Judd’s fists were so tight, he was in danger of fracturing his own bones. He understood why Brenna had needed to talk to Dorian. He even understood that the leopard saw Brenna as a young sister, not a potential lover. None of that made any difference. Judd wanted to be the one she turned to when in need. Ice picks of pain shoved through his skull, dissonance so vicious it nearly shut down his consciousness. The countdown was getting inexorably closer to the end. Uncurling his fingers with sheer force of will, he watched the blood rush back in. Last night had made it clear that he’d already crossed too many lines, broken too many rules. Soon, it would be too late to draw back. “Thank you, Dorian.” No, he would not pull back. Brenna was his. His to pleasure. And his to comfort...

This is new for me, but it’s new for her, too. We are both two broken souls, fractured in opposite ways. She loved and lost… And I was lost before I could ever love at all.

It went on and on; intentionally, unintentionally, it didn't matter. The end was the same: broken people left in pieces, lives fractured, love bludgeoned.

We’re all broken, Sarah. It’s not always about fixing the parts that don’t work; it’s about making the most of the ones that do.

I became the fractured shell of a mustard seed to dwell for an eye-blink amid a starburst galaxy of broken dreams.

Stop waiting for Friday, for summer, for someone to find love with you, for life. Happiness is achieved when you stop waiting for it and make the most of the moment you are in now,

When I go in search of the origins of my broken heart, it is this sense of not being a priority to the two people who gave me life that creates a fracture in my feeling of worth.

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our humanity.

But it still compares. If you have a fractured bone, and I’ve broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?

If someone were to autopsy her heart, they'd find traces of life, evidence of eons gone by. Times when she'd been able to feel and the feelings left imprints. Maybe her heart was wearing a cast. Maybe it wasn't sclerosed at all but atrophied, shrunken, and the cast enclosing it was scribbled over with stories written in a dead language. Was there any softness left in there? Any spot that was still unfired, unformed, unglazed? Was there access? Entry? A place still open to impression? No. Her heart was finished. It bore, perhaps, records of life, but it wasn't alive. Too late for decoration. Too late for effects. Further handling could only result in cracks and fractures. People could cut themselves on the edges of her heart, she was sure of it.

When you haven’t yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn’t about death and rebirth. It’s about life and more life. It’s about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things. But when you’ve faced some kind of death—the loss of someone you loved dearly, the failure of a dream, the fracture of a relationship—that’s when you start understanding that central metaphor. When your life is easy, a lot of the really crucial parts of Christian doctrine and life are nice theories, but you don’t really need them. When, however, death of any kind is staring you in the face, all of a sudden rebirth and new life are very, very important to you.

The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

I think I used to be, but that part of me feels fractured. Wobbly. Broken down by a thousand and one callers who have fallen out of love. Who never had it in the first place. Love and romance seem like a fairy tale now, something we tell kids to help them sleep better at night. Something we tell ourselves too.

then repaired and rebuilt my pack’s broken bodies, washing away burns and fixing fractured energy bases. I could do all of that, fight the phoenix and drown in grief, because I was a woman. We multitasked well.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we never would have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source for our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

Distrust and contempt; physical, verbal, and psychological abuse; infidelity; emotional distance; and mutually disabling partnerships—these are the five most destructive dynamics that lead to fractured black relationships and broken families.

There were two things about this particular book (The Golden Book of Fairy Tales) that made it vital to the child I was. First, it contained a remarkable number of stories about courageous, active girls; and second, it portrayed the various evils they faced in unflinching terms. Just below their diamond surface, these were stories of great brutality and anguish, many of which had never been originally intended for children at all. (Although Ponsot included tales from the Brothers Grimm and Andersen, the majority of her selections were drawn from the French contes de fées tradition — stories created as part of the vogue for fairy tales in seventeenth century Paris, recounted in literary salons and published for adult readers.) I hungered for a narrative with which to make some sense of my life, but in schoolbooks and on television all I could find was the sugar water of Dick and Jane, Leave it to Beaver and the happy, wholesome Brady Bunch. Mine was not a Brady Bunch family; it was troubled, fractured, persistently violent, and I needed the stronger meat of wolves and witches, poisons and peril. In fairy tales, I had found a mirror held up to the world I knew — where adults were dangerous creatures, and Good and Evil were not abstract concepts. (…) There were in those days no shelves full of “self–help” books for people with pasts like mine. In retrospect, I’m glad it was myth and folklore I turned to instead. Too many books portray child abuse as though it’s an illness from which one must heal, like cancer . . .or malaria . . .or perhaps a broken leg. Eventually, this kind of book promises, the leg will be strong enough to use, despite a limp betraying deeper wounds that might never mend. Through fairy tales, however, I understood my past in different terms: not as an illness or weakness, but as a hero narrative. It was a story, my story, beginning with birth and ending only with death. Difficult challenges and trials, even those that come at a tender young age, can make us wiser, stronger, and braver; they can serve to transform us, rather than sending us limping into the future.

When the state of Florida dug him up fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he’d been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested by the broken bones. Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.

In here was the image of God. It isn't the devil in humanity that makes man a lonely creature, it's his God-likeness. It's the fullness of the Good that can't get out or can't find its proper "other place" that makes for loneliness.Anna's misery was for others. They just could not see the beauty of that broken iron stump, the colors, the crystalline shapes; they could not see the possibilities there. Anna wanted them to join with her in this exciting new world , but they could not imagine themselves to be so small that this jagged fracture could become a world of iron mountains, of iron plains with crystal trees.It was a new world to explore, a world of the imagination, a world where few people would or could follow her. In this broken-off stump was a whole new realm of possibilities to be explored and to be enjoyed. Mister God most certainly enjoyed it, but then Mister God didn't at all mind making himself small. People thought that Mister God was very big, and that's where they made a big mistake. Obviously Mister God could be any size he wanted to be. "If he couldn't be little, how could he know what it's like to be a lady -bird?" Indeed, how could he? So, like Alice in Wonderland, Anna ate of the cake of imagination and altered her size to fit the occasion.After all, Mister God did not have only one point of view but an infinity of viewing points, and the whole purpose of living was to be like Mister God. So far as Anna was concerned, being good, being generous, being kind, praying, and all that kind of stuff had very little to do with Mister God. They were, in the jargon of today, merely "spinoffs." This sort of thing was just "playing it safe," and Anna was going to have none of it. No! Religion was all about being like Mister God and it was here that things could get a little tough. The instructions weren't to be good and kind and loving, etc., and it therefore followed that you would be more like Mi ster God. No! The whole point of being alive was to be like Mister God and then you couldn't help but be good and kind and loving, could you?

Do you remember what I told you? About the philosophy behind this? That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.’ She

What is Destiny? Is it a doctrine formulated by aristocrats and philosophers arguing that there is some unseen driving force predicting the outcomes of every minuscule and life altering moment in one's life? Or is it the artistry illustrated by those under-qualifed and over-eager to give their future meaning and their ambitions hope? Is it a declaration by those who refuse to accept that we are alone in this universe, spinning randomly through a matrix of accidental coincidences? Or is it the assumptions made by those who concede that there is a divine plan or pre-ordained path for each human being,regardless of their current station? I think destiny is a bit of a tease.... It's syndical taunts and teases mock those naive enough to believe in its black jack dealing of inevitable futures. Its evolution from puppy dogs and ice cream to razor blades and broken mirrors characterizes the fickle nature of its sordid underbelly. Those relying on its decisive measures will fracture under its harsh rules. Those embracing the fact that life happens at a million miles a minute will flourish in its random grace. Destiny has afforded me the most magical memories and unbelievably tragic experiences that have molded and shaped my life into what it is today...beautiful. I fully accept the mirage that destiny promises and the reality it can produce. Without the invisible momentum carried with its sincere fabrication of coming attraction, destiny is the covenant we rely on to get ourselves through the day. To the destiny I know awaits me, I thank you in advance. Don't cry because it's over....smile because it happened.

If you have a fractured bone, and I’ve broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?” “No, but that’s not—” “Yes, it is. Feelings are relative. And at the root, they’re all the same, even if they grow from different experiences and exist on different scales.” He examined her face. She looked skeptical. “Sissix would understand this. You Humans really do cripple yourselves with your belief that you all think in unique ways.

Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We

Jesus’s final prayer was oriented around a vision for unity, and he commissioned his church to be the healing agent that brings the ministry of reconciliation into broken and fractured places in society. And yet an honest assessment raises more questions than answers. Is the church at large, and are we as individuals, currently making any contribution to healing the divisions? Or are we making things worse? Have we come to grips with our role in creating this divide, or are we stuck in a state of denial?

The physicists called it an adjustment of quantum emphasis. But the effect was to change the role of the observer. Of you and me. For the will of the observer to matter. So man could control his environment directly through the force of his desire, rather than through machinery.” I had the feeling that if I died he would carry on saying his piece to my corpse. “Unfortunately that wheel wasn’t just turned—it was set turning. It hasn’t stopped. In fact, like so many things in nature, the process has a tipping point and we’re reaching it. The fractures in the world, in the walls between mind and matter, between energy and will, between life and death, they’re all growing. And everything is in danger of falling through the cracks. Each time these powers, the ability to influence energy or mass or existence, are used, the divergence grows. These are the magics you know as being fire-sworn, or rock-sworn, or as necromancy and the like. The more they are used, the easier they become, and the wider the world is broken open. And this Dead King of yours is just another symptom. Another example of a singular force of will being used to change the world and, in doing so, accelerating the turn of that wheel we released.

The broken parts of me recognise the fractures in him, even if he hasn’t permitted me close enough to touch them yet.

Skin heals, broken hearts mend, and eventually emotions become less fraught and torn, but memories never fade

Things are uncertain in this world, no one knows that better than you, but if you don't have at least some faith, than you have nothing.

Depression is a fracture of not just your mind, it’s a fracture of your very being – everything you thought you were or stood for feels broken.

I thought this part of me was broken. That’s I’d never have this with anyone. You’re a miracle. Made me truly live again.

Perhaps we have not broken God’s law today, in a strictly defined legal sense. But have we failed to love?

How do they go on...in a city that tells them day after day that they are fractured and broken...that there is no way out or up?

THE WORLD IS FULL of broken people. Splints, casts, miracle drugs, and time can’t mend fractured hearts, wounded minds, torn spirits.

Across from her was the same broken sort of creature. One that was fractured, splintered, and destroyed then put back together again just to be used as someone else's tool.

On particularly rough days when I'm sure I can't possibly endure more, I remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days has been 100%. And that’s pretty good. Unknown

It was the moths that first revealed the change. Grey-tipped whispers in the moonlit night. Two or three here, a single one there. White ones slipping through the darkness, silent and seemingly harmless, but present. Growing in numbers until they erupted the quiet like flutters of falling ash. There was a music in their silence. The kind of music that attached itself to hums and vibrations in the waters of the earth. The hums, the vibrations, all but imperceptible. With the dawn the moths vanished, leaving a broken land in their wake. The Elian River leaked out into fissures of streams and brooks that first appeared as watery cracks throughout the Faeran Valley. So small at first, we didn't recognize the difference. But as the months and years passed, the Elian slipped further and deeper into the growing fractures of earth the moths had left. Trails of watery branches and veins that broke the ground until it couldn't sustain life any longer. This is what we have against the Bremistans. The land is delicate now, brittle like old bones. And I fear it is aging beyond our ability to heal it....

Two broken ribs,” he said. “You?” “Six,” Jabari replied. “Punctured lung. Some other minor fractures” “Three and a concussion,” I added. What a weird dick measuring contest to be a part of.

What if I stopped fighting for the trance of long-form days, where I would be uninterrupted and ambitiously absorbed in a big project? What if I gave myself over to time's dispersion? Could I value the fractured moments as something more than 'sub-time' or lost time or broken time? Could I find a graceful way to work and be in the world that might still pull me up and forward?

Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed. It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook. It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor. The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one. As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude. There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images. Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly... Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle. Nanny grinned. 'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over.

Empty—it was utterly empty here. Like a tomb. “Tam?” I called. I bounded up the front steps and into the house. I rushed inside, swearing as I slid on a piece of broken porcelain—the remnants of a vase. Slowly, I turned in the front hall. It looked as if an army had marched through. Tapestries hung in shreds, the marble banister was fractured, and the chandeliers lay broken on the ground, reduced to mounds of shattered crystal. “Tamlin?” I shouted. Nothing. The windows had all been blown out. “Lucien?” No one answered. “Tam?” My voice echoed through the house, mocking me. Alone in the wreckage of the manor, I sank to my knees. He was gone.

He decided that, despite the swelling and purple bruises, neither my ribs nor my kneecap were broken. Fractured, maybe, but there was no way of telling without an X-ray. ‘Feel like a drive to the hospital in Milas?’ he

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We

The doc began waving a medical Pentracorder over Hadrian. “Oh dear! Fractured ego, sprained confidence, dislocated immodesty, and broken bravado! Can this even be cured? Extensive long-term damage is the sad prognosis, alas.

Three fractured ribs. Sprained LCL. Twisted ankle. Broken nose. That’s most of it.’ That’s most of it. Jeremy’s chest ached with tender grief. It was a heat normally reserved for game nights against their most violent opponents, a niggling sense of helplessness as people repeatedly tried to hurt a team that just wanted to have a good time. Jeremy powered his phone off before he could ask Kevin ‘Why?’ A reason wouldn’t take back what they’d done.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world's sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis of our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

With Colleen’s passing, something fractured inside of Simon. Something like a bone—a part of him that, even if it managed to heal, would always bear evidence of its imperfection. A tiny part of him that would always be broken.

I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

all you can do is keep putting one foot in front of the other, looking for the joke in things – because there is always a joke, even if it’s bitter and sour – hoping for the best and trying not to be too broken when it doesn’t happen.

Swirled tight, trussed, manic, most trusted. You love hills, swells, waves of sand, waves of water. You love traffic on bridges that might split in two. You love stairs leading to stairs leading to ice cream stands. Shards of pottery as good as a map. You love fractured control towers and the very broken Alaskan Way Viaduct. You love squat corner stores and barber-pole signs. You love the idea of privacy in a city of windows, the idea of light in a city of shadows.

The medical profession has seen quite a bit of me over the years. My case history would make any surgeon blink in disbelief. On the way to the Olympics, I’ve had broken arms, hands, fingers, feet, a fractured jaw and neck and even a broken back.

Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

My palm connected with the final looking-glass. A wave of brittle fractures rippled outward from the place my sanguine hand had struck. It shattered. I watched the pieces of my former life--the reflection of this monster I'd become—fall about my feet in a hailstorm of blood, tears, and broken mirrors. My attrition was complete. And now dissension boiled in my veins. I would find my penance. Even if God could not forgive me, even if she could not forgive me...maybe I could at least find the power to forgive myself.

This light represents the finest of all of us: Our art, poetry and songs, discoveries, creations, and science. Our ability to pick ourselves up from a broken, mad, fractured life and feel part of another, and be part of whatever this universe is. To have a little bit of hope in spite of the madly ruthless, even horrific, drumbeat of history. In the midst of ruin, to discover some sort of unimaginable grace. To hide from death for yet one more day. On this, the darkest day, people will light a candle for all of that.

She had to do something. Anything. She had to focus, think, fight. She wasn’t anybody’s point to prove. She was fucking Batgirl. Her body was broken and her mind jagged and fractured by trauma, but she was still alive, and she wasn’t going down without a fight.

Look at you,” he said. “A fractured man, a broken thing. I asked for money to kill you, but none would give it. Now I understand why. There is no value to you. You’re nothing, and therefore nothing is what your life is worth. But I will kill you anyway, out of pity.

I do not know who I am anymore. I though I was animal. I am no longer so sure. It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit too has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows when the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it. For some people that time never comes. Some stay fractured, forever broken. You see them on the street pushing carts, you see them in the faces of regulars at a bar. My cocoon was that room.

My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn't just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can't effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. The ways in which I have been hurt - and have hurt others - are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity. I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour. I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We've become so fearful and vengeful that we've thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak - not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how we've pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we've legalized vengeful and cruel punishments, how we've allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We've submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible. But simply punishing the broken - walking away from them or hiding them from sight - only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations - over the things they'd done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things that you can't otherwise see; you hear things you can't otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

You've got to find forgiveness, Florence," said Elsie. "You find it so easily in other people, why do you struggle so much to find it in yourself?" "I'm a bad person. I'm flawed. Damaged." "Of course you are." I looked at him. "We all are. Every one of us is damaged. We need the faults, the breaks, the fracture lines." "We do?" I said. 'Of course we do. However else would all the light get in?" I could see Elsie smiling at us. "You can't define yourself by a single moment." Jack held my hand very tightly. I could feel him shaking. "That moment doesn't make you who you are." "Then what does?" I said. "Oh, Florence. Everything else," he said. "Everything else.

There’s the kind of broken everyone can see. The kind that leaves a mess no one wants to get stuck cleaning up because it’s obviously going to be a lot of work. And, even if you try to get it all, you’re going to miss some of those sharp, jagged pieces. Then there’s the kind of broken no one can see. The kind that’s made up of hairline fractures and narrow little fissures that cover the entire surface. It’s the kind of broken that’s held together by some kind of miracle and pure strength of will. All it takes is one little bump, one wrong move, and that kind of broken shatters. There is no cleaning up that mess. There are too many pieces, and they scatter everywhere

The wind whistles down into the skyscraper-bound canyons, across the broad expanses of the avenues and the narrow confines of the streets, where lives unfolded in secret, day in, day out: Sometimes a man sighs for want of love. Sometimes a child cries for the dropped lollipop, its sweetness barely tasted. Sometimes the girl gasps as the train screams into the station, shaken by how close she’d allowed herself to wander to the edge. Sometimes the drunk raises weary eyes to the rows of building rendered beautiful by a brief play of sunlight. “Lord?” he whispers into the held breath between taxi horns. The light catches on a city spire, fracturing for a second into glorious rays before the clouds move in again. The drunk lowers his eyes. “Lord, Lord…” he sobs, as if answering his own broken prayer. […] Another day closes. The sun sinks low on the horizon. It slips below the Hudson, smearing the West Side of Manhattan in a slick of gold. Night arrives for its watchful shift. The neon city bursts its daytime seams, and the great carnival of dreams begins again.

That's not the same. What happened to you, to your species, it's... it doesn't even compare.' 'Why? Because it's worse?' She nodded. 'But it still compares. If you have a fractured bone, and I've broken every bone in my body, does that make your fracture go away? Does it hurt you any less, knowing that I am in more pain?' 'No, but that's not-' 'Yes it is. Feelings are relative.

Loss changed you. But you could heal. You could repair your fractured spirit with golden lacquer and hold on to life. That life wouldn’t look the same ever again. But it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be worthwhile. That it wouldn’t be beautiful. Perhaps loss taught a person to love life more. Because you understood what it was like to lose that life. You wouldn’t take it for granted anymore.

As long as this “brokenness” of existence continues, there is no way out of the inner contradictions that it imposes upon us. If a man has a broken leg and continues to try to walk on it, he cannot help suffering. If desire itself is a kind of fracture, every movement of desire inevitably results in pain. But even the desire to end the pain of desire is a movement, and therefore causes pain. The desire to remain immobile is a movement. The desire to escape is a movement. The desire for Nirvana is a movement. The desire for extinction is a movement. Yet there is no way for us to be still by “imposing stillness” on the desires. In a word, desire cannot stop itself from desiring, and it must continue to move and hence to cause pain even when it seeks liberation from itself and desires its own extinction.

The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight. "I can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself -- for they had to contain all voices within them, had to be all things and nothing. They had to have the ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land. "The old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero's battle with a fabulous beast -- the beast that is in the hero." "The storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and incantations before their people did in reality, they became the repositories of the people's wisdom and follies. Often, conscripted by kings, they became the memory of a people's origins, and carried with them the long line of ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries, the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things, the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes for wars, causes of victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods. They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change." "These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity's truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly." "They risked their sanity and their consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of the interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination." "And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing around us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our way through the dark descending nights ahead -- I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them to be whole again.

I thought about what would happen if I were to write a novel that does not look, for example, at a vase on its pedestal—finished, polished, tweaked, tightened, cleaned—but rather, took the vase, already broken, its jagged and fractured narratives embedded in dirt, and insisted that, in order to comprehend and engage in this work, one does not have to repair the broken history into fullness, but that the story, in shambles, is complete.

I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

The shell may be broken, and even portions of it removed, and yet after a certain lapse of time the injured parts will be repaired by a deposition of shelly matter at the fractured parts. “There’s hope for me yet!” says Etienne, and laughs, and Marie-Laure is reminded that her great-uncle was not always so fearful, that he had a life before this war and before the last one too; that he was once a young man who dwelled in the world and loved it as she does.

The lights of the city hovered in a nimbus and again stood fractured in the black river, isinglass image, tangled broken shapes splash of lights along the bridgewalk following the elliptic and receding rows of the pole lamps across to meet them. The rhythmic arc of the wipers on the glass lulled him and he coasted out onto the bridge, into the city shrouded in rain and silence, the cars passing him slowly, their headlamps wan, watery lights in sorrowful progression.

We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent...We are bodies of broken bones...Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

Her words, herself: broken up, pieced together. Today she falls to the ground, together with her words, but regains her footing: the words arise once more, as she herself rises. She is thankful for those undulating words that hold her again, caressing her body and recognizing her scars. Her body and her phrase will tear again, but not at the old scars: they will split open in a different way, revealing new fractures. She accepts this future violence as something not necessarily negative, as a sign, perhaps, of a secret order.

I was broken too, Dalton. Shattered. Unsalvageable.” My gaze falls to her lips, watching as they curl upward into a timid smile. “Until the day I met you, that is. The day that every single one of my fractured pieces permanently fused with yours, rebuilding me with renewed strength so I could stand strong and fight for you.” She shakes her head. “I won’t give up on you. I will never stop believing in you. And I will continue to fight for you until the day I die because without you here” – she brings my palm to her chest – “I do not exist.

And there it is, proof if proof were needed, that though God may mould the clay and fashion some of us hale, some strong, some beautiful, inside we make ourselves, from foolish things, breakable, fragile things: the thorns, that dog, the hope that Katherine might make me better than I am. Even Rike’s blunt wants were born of losses he probably remembered only in dreams. All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world. And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we’re closer to gods than we know.

this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of

In writing this, I am not being political, but am rather pointing out the deeply divided condition of the nation. Divisions range from politics to religion to race. Not since the Civil War have we seen so many fractures in so many places at such deep levels. We are no longer “one nation” and no longer does our nation regard itself to be “under God” in any effective sense. The bad news is that we are beyond healing. Certain trends have been allowed to go too far unchecked and we now live with a shattered national consciousness, a downgraded consciousness of morality and a broken sense of who we are as a people.

But it didn’t stay that way. Sin entered the world, and since then everything has been a mess. Our world is sick, and none of us are immune to the infection. At our cores we’re sinners. We purposely rebel against our Creator. We were made to be mirrors perfectly reflecting God’s goodness, but with sin that mirror was fractured and the reflection is distorted. Instead of following God, we assume we’re wiser and follow our own misguided intuition. We’re choosing what we think will make us happy, but in the process we’ve made God angry. He despises sin and He will judge us for it. We’re beautifully made, but tragically broken.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.

And you,' she hissed at me. 'You,' Her teeth gleamed- turning sharp. 'I'm going to kill you.' Someone cried out, but I couldn't move, couldn't even try to get out of the way as something far more violent than lightning struck me, and I crashed to the floor. 'I'm going to make you pay for your insolence,' Amarantha snarled, and a scream ravaged my throat as pain like nothing I had know erupted through me. My very bones were shattering as my body rose and then slammed onto the hard floor, and I was crushed beneath another wave of torturous agony. 'Admit you don't really love him, and I'll spare you,' Amarantha breathed, and through my fractured vision, I saw her prowl toward me. 'Admit what a cowardly, lying, inconstant bit of human garbage you are.' I wouldn't- I wouldn't say that even if she splattered me across the ground. But I was being ripped apart from the inside out, and I thrashed, unable to out-scream the pain. 'Feyre!' someone roared. No, not someone- Rhysand. But Amarantha still neared. 'You think you're worthy of him? A High Lord? You think you deserve anything at all, human?' My back arched, and my ribs cracked, one by one. Rhysand yelled my name again- yelled it as though he cared. I blacked out, but she brought me back, ensuring that I felt everything, ensuring that I screamed every time a bone broke.

I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

Tairn punches his tail forward, underneath us, swinging his body in a way I’ve never experienced, and I fall backward, my stomach lodging in my throat as the ground takes the place of the sky and the strap pulls tight across my thighs, holding me upside down long enough for my heart to pound in my ears twice. Snap. Bone fractures, and Tairn rolls right, dragging the broken-necked corpse of a wyvern with us, then releasing it once we level. I force my stomach back where it belongs and prepare to strike the other as it lunges for us. It snaps its jaws, teeth clashing mere feet from Tairn’s shoulder as it misses, cutting at least two years off my life. I extend my arm— “Do not!” Tairn orders, and a second later, brown scales consume my field of vision as Aotrom clasps the wyvern’s head between his teeth and bites as we pass.

So, what's the story?" "No story. Just a nightmare.” “Meaning?” “Meaning, heavy compression lines in his cartilage, severe bruising on his kidneys, liver and lower intestines. Fracture marks on his collar bone, tibia, radius, humerus, scapular, femur and every single one of his ribs have been broken. Don't even get me started on the concussive damage to his skull and brain tissue. Twenty-three percent of this boys body is scared for life. And yet, every organ is functioning normally and his neurological activity is above average. He's eighteen years old and he weights about two bills but remove the scar tissue and he'd weigh about a buck-ten. All in all, I say he lived inside a hydraulic car press, went through the Napoleonic wars and was on board the Hindenburg when it went down in flame and yet he's okay...this boy just refuses to die.

Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

It was up to fathers to help boys “find the correct path to masculinity,” and for this reason the father’s role was “more critical now than at any time in history.” In this respect, Farrar agreed with Dobson that “our very survival as a people will depend upon the presence or absence of masculine leadership in millions of homes,” but in the decade since Dobson had characterized the Western world as standing at a “great crossroads in its history,” things hadn’t improved. If anything, they’d gotten worse. As “point man,” the father needed to protect sons from feminization. Boys, he explained, were naturally aggressive due to their higher levels of testosterone; aggression was “part of being male.” Little boys were prone to doing reckless things like jumping off slides and swinging like Tarzan, splitting their heads open on occasion. But this was just part of being a boy. “They will survive the scars and broken bones of boyhood,” Farrar wrote, “but they cannot survive being feminized.

What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles. Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible.

I've been thinking about what you told me Friday night, about having a broken brain, not a broken spirit. And I've been thinking about what it means to be broken, and how we call things broken that aren't - fractured. It made me think about fractals. Do you know what a Mandelbrot Set is? [...] So, a Mandelbrot Set is one kind of fractal. All fractals are self similar, which means they have a pattern that repeats at different levels of magnification. Fractals are infinitely recursive and orderly, but they appear to be chaotic. [...] Mathematicians use fractals to model things that appear to be chaotic but are really accumulations of complex patterns. Fractured things - not broken, because broken implies that there is a normal, when mathematically there isn't. Normal would simply mean easily predictable, like a salt crystal. Fractured things like snowflakes and mountain ranges are more geometrically interesting and require more complex modeling. [...] You are a fractured snowflake, a pattern, repeated in infinite detail in a world full of salt crystals. You're not broken, you're perfect.

Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me - 1953- The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. Can admire with two eyes the mountain, actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. Can make black-eyed peas and collards. Can make, from last year's late-ripening persimmons, a pudding. Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain, then to the question. The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, and still they surprised. I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something. Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. Today, I woke without answer. The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend don't despair of this falling world, not yet didn't it give you the asking

Heart racing, Nesta lifted the lantern in one hand and gazed at the darkness, untouched by the light from the library high, high above. The heart of the world, of existence. Of self. The heart of the House. 'This...' Her fingers tightened on the lantern. 'This darkness is your heart.' As if in answer, the House laid a little evergreen sprig at her feet. 'A Winter Solstice present. For me. She could have sworn warm hands brushed her neck in answer. 'But your darkness...' Wonder softened her voice. 'You were trying to show me. Show others. Who you are, down deep. What haunts you. You were trying to show them all those dark, broken pieces because the priestesses, and Emerie, and I... We're the same as you.' Her throat constricted at what the House had gifted her. This knowledge. She lifted the lantern higher and blew out its flame. Let the darkness sweep in. Embraced it. 'I'm not afraid,' she whispered into it. 'You are my friend, and my home. Thank you for sharing this with me.' Again, Nesta could have sworn that phantom touch caressed her neck, her cheek, her brow. 'Happy Solstice,' she said into the beautiful, fractured darkness.

Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe— France, Italy, Belgium—and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirror, the shah’s architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches. [...] These centuries of Persians trying to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred.

Mortarion was still the greater of them. He was still the stronger, the more steeped in preternatural gifts, but now all that he felt was doubt, rocked by the remorseless fury of one who had never been anything more than flighty, self-regarding and unreliable. All Mortarion could see just then was one who wished to kill him - who would do anything, sacrifice anything, fight himself beyond physical limits, destroy his own body, his own heart, his own soul, just for the satisfaction of the oaths he had made in the void. 'If you know what I did,' Mortarion cried out, fighting on now through that cold fog of indecision, 'then you know the truth of it, brother - I can no longer die.' It was as if a signal had been given. The Khan's bloodied head lifted, the remnants of his long hair hanging in matted clumps. 'Oh, I know that,' he murmured, with the most perfect contempt he had ever mustered. 'But I can.' Then he leapt. His broken legs still propelled him, his fractured arms still bore his blade, his blood-filled lungs and perforated heart still gave him just enough power, and he swept in close. If he had been in the prime of condition, the move might have been hard to counter, but he was already little more than a corpse held together by force of will, and so Silence interposed itself, catching the Khan under his armour-stripped shoulder and impaling him deep. But that didn't stop him. The parry had been seen, planned for, and so he just kept coming, dragging himself up the length of the blade until the scythe jutted out of his ruptured back and the White Tiger was in tight against Mortarion's neck. For an instant, their two faces were right up against one another - both cadaverous now, drained of blood, drained of life, existing only as masks onto pure vengeance. All their majesty was stripped away, scraped out across the utilitarian rockcrete, leaving just the desire, the violence, the brute mechanics of despite. It only took a split second. Mortarion's eyes went wide, realising that he couldn't wrench his brother away in time. The Khan's narrowed. 'And that makes the difference,' Jaghatai spat. He snapped his dao across, severing Mortarion's neck cleanly in an explosion of black bile, before collapsing down into the warp explosion that turned the landing stage, briefly, into the brightest object on the planet after the Emperor's tormented soul itself.

When I hung up the phone that night I had a wet face and a broken heart. The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore. For the first time I realized my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. I looked at my computer and at the calendar on the wall. I looked again around my office at the stacks of files. I saw the list of our staff, which had grown to nearly forty people. And before I knew it, I was talking to myself aloud: “I can just leave. Why am I doing this?” It took me a while to sort it out, but I realized something sitting there while Jimmy Dill was being killed at Holman prison. After working for more than twenty-five years, I understood that I don’t do what I do because it’s required or necessary or important. I don’t do it because I have no choice. I do what I do because I’m broken, too. My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty, oppression, and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself. Being close to suffering, death, executions, and cruel punishments didn’t just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and heartbreak, it also exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt––and have hurt others––are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us. Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

I thought my life had fractured that day, and in truth it had. But just like a fractured limb, it’s stronger now, in those broken places that have healed.

Reacher twisted the skinny guy’s hand so that his inner arm was facing up, then gripped him by the wrist. “You know when people say a kid has a broken arm, the bone is often not severed all the way? It’s what’s called a green stick fracture. The bone’s just bent. Because young people are supple. But as you grow older, your bones become more brittle. They no longer bend. They shatter. Now, this guy’s no kid. He’s not old, either. I wonder how far his bones will go before they snap.

With tinny drumbeats, the rain pounds the roof My teary eyes compete They can't keep up Breathe Let it go Breathe The vice on my chest tightens its razoring grip I gasp No relief If only tears could soothe the pain Then, I would look upon the tidal waves against these walls without fear Crush and roll me, I'd plead, Mold my body anew But with these tears come no healing, Just death, slow and determined This old girl, this old woman, this old soul lives here inside A tortoise outgrowing this hare's body This youthful skin encasing a crumbling frame I smooth the matted web of curls off my sweaty neck And roll my eyes at the clock How slowly the time squeaks by here in this room, In this comfortless bed I abandon the warmth from under my blanket tower and shiver The draft rattles my spine One by one, striking my vertebrae Like a spoon chiming empty wine glasses, Hitting the same fragile note till my neck shakes the chill away I swipe along the naked floor with a toe for the slippers beneath the bed Plush fabric caresses my feet Stand! Get up With both hands, Gravity jerks me back down Ugh! This cursed bed! No more, I want no more of it I try again My legs quiver in search of my former strength Come on, old girl, Come on, old woman, Come on, old soul, Don't quit now The floor shakes beneath me, Hoping I trip and fall To the living room window, I trudge My joints grind like gravel under tires More pain no amount of tears can soothe away Pinching the embroidered curtain between my knuckles, I find solace in the gloom The wind humming against the window, Makes the house creak and groan Years ago, the cold numbed my pain But can it numb me again, This wretched body and fractured soul? Outside I venture with chants fluttering my lips, Desperate solemn pleas For comfort, For mercy For ease, For health I open the plush throw spiraled around my shoulders And tiptoe around the porch's rain-soaked boards The chilly air moves through me like Death on a mission, My body, an empty gorge with no barriers to stop him, No flesh or bone My highest and lowest extremities grow numb But my feeble knees and crippling bones turn half-stone, half-bone Half-alive, half-dead No better, just worse The merciless wind freezes my tears My chin tumbles in despair I cover myself and sniffle Earth’s scent funnels up my nose: Decay with traces of life in its perfume The treetops and their slender branches sway, Defying the bitter gusts As I turn to seek shelter, the last browned leaf breaks away It drifts, it floats At the weary tree’s feet, it makes its bed alongside the others Like a pile of corpses, they lie Furled and crinkled with age No one mourns their death Or hurries to honor the fallen with thoughtful burials No rage-filled cries echo their protests at the paws trampling their fragile bodies, Or at the desecration by the animals seeking morning relief And new boundaries to mark Soon, the stark canopy stretching over the pitiful sight Will replace them with vibrant buds and leaves Until the wasting season again returns For now, more misery will barricade my bones as winter creeps in Unless Death meets me first to end it

Do you remember what I told you? About the philosophy behind this? That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.” And then she said, “Heal your heart, Ella. Let Angus help you. Mend your marriage with veins of the purest gold and remake it, better and stronger than before.” And we did. Because, you see, Kendra, I fell in love with your grandfather all over again. Caroline was right: our love was worth mending. In the end, we made the scars part of the beauty of our marriage.

Humans are fragile creatures. We fracture easily, and there are some pains even magic can't heal. Broken hearts. Empty bellies. Lost dreams.

She stared at the water until the sun’s reflection became too much, and then reached for her single bag of belongings. Digging around, she found the clay turtle. It was made of earth. It was tiny. She could use it for practice. Small, she thought as she cradled it with both hands. Precise. Silent. Small. She curled her lips in concentration. It was like crooking the tip of her pinky while wiggling her opposite ear. She needed a whole-body effort to keep her focus sufficiently narrow. There was another reason why she didn’t want to seek instruction from a famous bending master with a sterling reputation and wisdom to spare. Such a teacher would never let her kill Jianzhu in cold blood. Her hunger to learn all four elements had nothing to do with becoming a fully realized Avatar. Fire, Air, and Water were simply more weapons she could bring to bear on a single target. And she had to bring her earthbending up to speed too. Small. Precise. The turtle floated upward, trembling in the air. It wasn’t steady the way bent earth should be, more of a wobbling top on its last few spins. But she was bending it. The smallest piece of earth she’d ever managed to control. A minor victory. This was only the beginning of her path. She would need much more practice to see Jianzhu broken in pieces before her feet, to steal his world away from him the way he had stolen hers, to make him suffer as much as possible before she ended his miserable worthless life— There was a sharp crack. The turtle fractured along innumerable fault lines. The smallest parts, the blunt little tail and squat legs, crumbled first. The head fell off and bounced over the edge of the saddle. She tried to close her grip around the rest of it and caught only dust. The powdered clay slipped between her fingers and was taken by the breeze. Her only keepsake of Kelsang flew away on the wind.

Guar, mostly imported from India, is derived from the guar bean. It is used extensively in the food industry to assure consistency in cakes, pies, ice cream, breakfast cereals, and yogurt. But it has another major use—in fracking, in a Jell-O-like slosh that carries sand into the fractures to expand them. But guar and the related additives were expensive. At a baseball game in Dallas, Steinsberger ran into some other geologists who had successfully replaced much of the guar with water, but in another part of Texas and not in shale. In 1997, he experimented with their water recipe on a couple of shale wells, without success. Steinsberger got approval for one final try. This was the SH Griffin #4 in Dish. The team was still using water to replace most of the guar, but this time they fed in the sand more slowly. By the spring of 1998, they had the answer. “The well,” said Steinsberger, “was vastly superior to any other well that Mitchell had ever drilled.” The code for shale had been broken.

Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity. The secret form of the Other is what has to be reconstituted, as in anamorphosis, starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture.

Inside she feels like a collection of tiny pieces, fractured and broken. So, why shouldn't the outside look the same?

In the realm of boundless skies I soar, With the fire of beginnings, I implore, Though thorns may pierce, and darkness may loom, I'll test my strength in thunder's fierce boom. For high above, I seek my place, In the heavens, a name to embrace, Yet every breath fuels my might, As I brave the storms, take flight in the night. In the face of dust, my resolve remains, Despite the wounds, and life's crushing pains, I stand unbroken, my spirit's ablaze, In the crucible, I'll burn and amaze. Though I may stumble, and falter, and strain, In my heart, the desire remains untamed, With sparks in my eyes, and hope in my veins, I'll rise from the ashes, through trials and gains. For I've etched in my fists, a star's radiant gleam, In the city's uproar, I'll conquer, it seems, Though darkness may fall in an infinite stream, My end won't be falling; it's more than it seems. On my face, I may wear the marks of the fight, With a broken resolve, a fractured light, But within my core, strength takes its flight, And from the embers, I'll emerge in the night. Though breaths may shatter, and heartbeats may sway, In the depths of my being, I'll find my way, With fiery gaze, and a steadfast say, I'll conquer the tempest, come what may. I've woven a star in the palm of my hand, Let the drums of the city resound, understand, Though shadows may gather, like grains of sand, My fall is not final, I'll rise and expand. In the realm of boundless skies, I roam, With a heart unyielding, I'll find my home, Through trials and triumphs, I'll ceaselessly roam, My end isn't falling; it's where I'll become.

In the tapestry of life, where shadows of broken hearts dance in the twilight, the coin of security often tarnished, and the truth, a tempestuous muse, we find ourselves entwined in the sonnet of hard feelings, woven with threads of uncertainty and the delicate dance of fractured trust.

Broken beyond repair, I needed you to show me that you care. Fractured into a thousand pieces, filled with self-loathing. Safe in your arms around me. You saved me from myself.

Cocking a brow, she rose. “What’s all this about?” she asked the House, following the trail it had left. Down the hall, along the stairs, all the way down to the library itself. “Where are we going?” Nesta asked the warm air. Mercifully, even the night owls amongst the priestesses had gone to sleep, leaving no one to see her hurrying after the trail of branches. Around the levels of the library they twined, deeper and deeper, until they reached the seventh level. Nesta drew up short as the trail stopped at the edge of the wall of darkness. A light flickered beyond it. Several lights. As if to say, Come. Don’t be afraid. So Nesta sucked in a breath as she stepped into the gloom. Little tea lights wended into a familiar darkness. She and Feyre had once ventured down here—had faced horrors here. No evidence remained of that day. Only the firelit dimness, the candles leading her to the lowest levels of the library. To the pit itself. Nesta followed them, spiraling to the bottom of the pit, where one small lantern glowed, faintly illuminating the rows of books veiled in permanent shadow around it. Heart racing, Nesta lifted the lantern in one hand and gazed at the darkness, untouched by the light from the library high, high above. The heart of the world, of existence. Of self. The heart of the House. “This …” Her fingers tightened on the lantern. “This darkness is your heart.” As if in answer, the House laid a little evergreen sprig at her feet. “A Winter Solstice present. For me.” She could have sworn a warm hand brushed her neck in answer. “But your darkness …” Wonder softened her voice. “You were trying to show me. Show others. Who you are, down deep. What haunts you. You were trying to show them all those dark, broken pieces because the priestesses, and Emerie, and I … We’re the same as you.” Her throat constricted at what the House had gifted her. This knowledge. She lifted the lantern higher and blew out its flame. Let the darkness sweep in. Embraced it. “I’m not afraid,” she whispered into it. “You are my friend, and my home. Thank you for sharing this with me.” Again, Nesta could have sworn that phantom touch caressed her neck, her cheek, her brow. “Happy Solstice,” she said into the beautiful, fractured darkness.

His words ghost over my skin, caressing my fractured soul. Invading my mind in a way that no one else ever will. All because Elijah Woods is me. Broken pieces held together by bitter resentment and determination to take up less goddamn space in the world.

Everything made to be enjoyed for a little while and then broken. One day this, too, fractured like pot shards under a city.

But your—magical passages are too—and broken to—handle any more being—on you.” She hated magic, her original opinion was reaffirmed anew as her mind began to level from the potion. “Vhalla —ten, you had two broken ribs — — left side and the right side of your —cage was shattered. Your hands are a wreck. Your left shoulder was shattered, and your right was dislocated. Your spine was all out of alignment, and your hips were fractured along with one of your legs.

The chill in her heart seemed to mock her as it echoed “critters,” “debris,” and “tempestuous.” The iciness inside of her only hardened as she contemplated how she had so callously left her husband behind at the gas station. Surely no woman in her right mind would do what she had done. As she examined these thoughts, she tried to make order of them and what caused the break--for something had definitely been broken. Cracked. Fractured. And now those frozen fractals were piercing her heart and mind. She would add “soul” but at this point, she wondered what had become of hers.

For me things got messier before they got better. Breakthrough came through the unexpected form of God’s people. Though it was God’s people who had hurt me, they became the tool God used to heal my broken heart. A loving pastor who wouldn’t give up on me. His wife who understood me. A small church community who saw past my defenses. Though it was God’s people who fueled the deconstruction of my faith, it was also God’s people who would become the building blocks for its reconstruction.

Samkiel lightly grabbed my arms. "How could I not be completely and utterly in love with you?" "You love me?" My heart melted. "With everything I am and everything I will be." My world stopped. It was fractured and remade with those words. They weren't just words but a promise, a declaration from two people who had been burned by the world. We had lost everything and never wished to share with another so deeply. He had offered me his heart, and in return, I'd given him the broken pieces of mine. It was more than love for us, and I knew now it always had been.

my breath. What was wrong with me? “Pinkie promise, I will never abandon you, Your Highness.” More of those odd words of hers, but they meant something to me. Everyone I held dear had left me. I’d lost them and secluded myself, yet this creature. . . No, this woman promised me something I had begged for. Such simple words, such a simple act, had fractured something in me and shifted my world. I stared at the empty night sky, watching her dark wings beat across the sky, her sleek form disappearing into the roiling clouds, away from me. “You promised,” I whispered as the sirens continued to wail.

The reality is that your lens is filled with cracks and fractures. For some, it may even be completely broken. You may not see yourself as you really are. You may not see your strengths, capabilities, abilities, and skill sets

I love you too," she whispered. The miserable sheen of quietness and the guilt that stood prolific within it had been fractured. Whatever silence had strewn the distance between us was broken, like the dusting of cobwebs off the mantlepiece of our marriage. In my grief, and in my relief, I held tight to the hope of a future glistering gold.

**Verse 1:** I'm a shattered vase, pieces on the floor, Once held together, not anymore. The cracks run deep, the edges sharp, A broken melody on a weathered harp. **Chorus:** But even broken things can find a way, To catch the light, to face the day. I may be fractured, but I'm not done, I'm broken, yes, but still I run. **Verse 2:** The mirror's truth, a fragmented sight, A mosaic of me in the morning light. I gather myself, piece by piece, In every fragment, there's a release. **Chorus:** 'Cause even broken things have a story to tell, Of battles fought and times they fell. I may be scattered, but I'm not gone, I'm broken, sure, but still I'm strong. **Bridge:** In the pieces, there's a chance to mend, To be whole again, to ascend. With every crack, there's a new start, A broken thing, with a beating heart. **Chorus:** So here's to the broken, the bent, the torn, To the weary souls, from the moment they're born. We may be broken, but we're not lost, We'll find our way, no matter the cost. **Outro:** So I'll take these pieces, make them shine, Embrace the broken, claim it as mine. For in the end, what's broken can mend, And this isn't broken, it's just the bend.

tarmac only slightly cracked, at other times the tarmac was broken and fractured by the plants growing through. But on the road went, narrowing slightly. He could feel the change in the air, smelling the sea breeze, the scent of salt on his face. It was fresher up here, away from the perfume of the trees and the winter undergrowth, the bare

Shattered teeth. Fractured toes. Broken hands. Broken hearts. It's the price they paid in hopes of winning a title.

two men made me fall for them. Hard. They both walked away at the same time. And look, I could handle the hit to my pride. I can pull up my big girl panties to deal with the humiliation of that. It’s the blows they dealt to my heart that left me broken. Shattered. I’m like a cartoon statue that’s been hammered. There’s a crack at the impact. The crack spreads into a thousand fractures, until I’m made of a million pieces. There’s a moment in the show when I’m frozen in air that way, and that’s how I’ve been living these past six months—the pieces suspended, waiting to fall. There’s no way to avoid it; the killing blow already happened.

What I am reveals unwanted truths about what they are: a piece of Americana - a broken person from a fractured country. I'm a product of America. I'm an American.

How deeply buried that feeling throbbed inside her. Not just buried, but fractured, broken into so many parts over so many years that right and wrong might never again be redeemed, and yet she could still feel its certainty. Like how all stars could seem a universe broken into shards or, on a clear night, the singular luster of that which refuses to be forgotten.

Tell us no one is broken? How can I recover when no one knew Of the fractured mind and splintered heart? How does one put together a soul When it was formed from shards of love?

Our hearts may have broken in Nebraska but in Colorado they split open along the fractures, crumble to pieces, blow away. The peaks and green valleys, the lakes set at the foot of mountains like offerings. Beautiful and doomed and thus terrible.

~The vulnerability of everything in life lies in its susceptibility to break. All relationships are capable of breaking under the weight of misunderstanding. Within the delicate balance of existence, everything carries the potential to break. From friendships to family ties to romantic connections, every relationship carries the potential to break. It's our dedication and respect that fortify these bonds against fractures...

he is the glue that keeps all my broken parts whole.

You’re mine, Régis. My broken boy. My love. And I will melt all your fractures back into one, smooth shape of a heart.

Tell me what you’re hiding, what you’re harboring, what you don’t want the world to know about yourself for fear that it will be cast into light. Tell me about the times you couldn’t save yourself. Give me your broken parts, your fractured pieces, everything that’s weighed too heavily on the floor of your heart for you to ever reach down and reassemble. Tell me where you went the first time that you lost yourself. Tell me the ways in which you never came back. Give me a map with coordinates that lead into the deepest, most twisted corner of your soul where all of your unconquered demons still lurk. Let me see them. Let me reach out and touch them with my own trembling fingers, because I still can’t bear to face my own. Give me your shortcomings. Tell me the story of the first person you never became and all the ways in which you let him die. Tell me which regrets tear on your heartstrings and which unfulfilled dreams still take up residence under your skin. Show me the mountains you never conquered, the roads you never traversed, the battles you surrendered before ever setting foot upon enemy soil. Show me the things you never measured up to because there’s no war more wounding than the one we never waged and there’s no road more daunting than the one that we never walked down. Give me your struggles and impurities. Tell me about the worst thing you have ever done. Tell me about the regret that slithered under your skin and beat through your bloodstream like an unwelcome disease after you made the biggest mistake of your life. Tell me how it ripped straight into to your soul and took you over. Talk to me about the times you couldn’t look at yourself in the mirror or fall asleep at night because the malevolence and madness of your own mind kept you reeling. Give me your vices and misjudgments because I can match each one with my own. Tell me all the ways in which you’re scarred by your own capacity for darkness. Let me fall in love with your human parts – the battles you can’t fight, the wounds you can’t heal, all the ways in which you are not enough for yourself. Give me your joys and your pain in equal measure because you are the most brilliant and terrible mixture of both. I don’t want your good intentions and your well wishes. I want the whole of you, the depth of you, the breadth of all you are and the light that shines in between your broken parts. Let me fall in love with what you’re missing, what you’ve lost and what you’re still holding onto, through and despite all of it. Show me the things you haven’t lost along the way. And I will show you your own greatest strengths.

That was diverse.” Poppy looks surprised as she slides down the wall like a bird that’s forgotten how to fly, landing in a crumpled heap on the curb. “Positively Dionysian,” I manage to slur. The world is a crazed kaleidoscope. Colors fight for space, desperate to steal each other’s names. “They’re just labels!” I yell at the untidy bundle of shades and bones near my foot. “Are you talking to me?” Patterns birthed by multiple reflections coalesce into Poppy’s face. “Maybe. I think other people’s musical chi has saturated my cells.” Myriad venues and tonal flavors are scattered through my memory, like broken harmonies. “Why did I feed on so many tunes?” “You wanted filtered sounds to rain down and seep clean through, beyond blood, to the soul.” A lone streetlight flickers behind her and for a few alienating seconds she shimmers in and out of existence. “Too much.” My stomach turns over, but I manage to keep everything down. If I throw up now, nothing will come out but music. “Tonight’s orgy of sound has left us in a pure, concentrated haze of other people’s emotions,” Poppy announces proudly, unperturbed by the fact I’m squatting in a gutter. She holds out her arms to me, palms turned up. “Look, I’m full of music.” I stare at the small woman, posed like a crazed Messiah. The cat mask is still caught in her hair. A cracking sound fills the air and her face starts to fracture into pieces, like shards of a broken mirror. Closing my eyes, I take deep breaths till my head calms down. When I open them again, Poppy is gone.

In a matter of seconds, his wooly body with a mouthful of hideous fangs and a fistful and a footful of monstrous claws lay in a hairy heap of blood and gore. He was still twitching, but completely incapacitated by a broken back and fractured limbs. His severed right arm lay at an odd angle to the side in a pool of blood.

I could have happily moved in and left my own cold, dark house behind, pretended as if this family were my own: loud and teasing and good-natured, instead of the fractured broken truth.

I'm an orthopedist. You probably know that when a bone is broken, it heals stronger because a knot forms around the fracture. The body, when given an opportunity to make up for an absence, may do so excessively, and recover to the point where it has more of that quality then those who had never suffered such inadequacy.

Can’t you tell I’m broken?” she demanded. “I can’t stand anyone touching me!” “You handled me touching you until I pushed you too far.” “Freaking out because someone you’re enjoying kissing tries to get closer to you is not normal.” “It wasn’t normal that I was turned into a vampire because a female vamp became obsessed with my best friend,” David replied. “When Liam didn’t follow after her, she decided to turn his friends in the hopes she would get him to fall in line with her. That’s about as far from normal as it gets. I didn’t have a clue about the paranormal being real when my transformation occurred. Vampires were for horror movies, not reality. Life’s not normal. Shit happens. We all work through it.” “Is that so, Dr. Phil?” The frustrating man smiled at her. “That’s so,” David replied.

The story was an 82 year old guy with a broken neck. He had apparently fallen in his bathroom that morning, cracking his 1st and 2nd vertebrae. I had a vague memory from medical school that this wasn't a good thing--the expression "hangman's fracture" kept bobbing up from the well of facts I do not use --but I had a much more distinct impression that this was not a case for cardiology. "And Ortho isn't taking him because?" I said wearily. "Because he's got internal organs, dude." I sighed. "So why me?" "Because they got an EKG." The MAO was clearly enjoying himself. I remembered he had recently been accepted to a cardiology fellowship. I braced myself for the punch line. "And?" "And there's ectopy on it. Ectopy." He then made a noise intended to suggest a ghost haunting something.

When trust is broken, foundational cracks occur which weaken the entire relationship. As with concrete, no amount of filling and patching you apply with the hope of fortifying the fracture will ever repair the weakness caused by the rift.

Avery had been around killers before, lots of killers, in her three years on the force, but it was kids with guns and knives that always gave her pause: kids like George. College student. Harvard University. Someone that seemingly had it all, and yet on the inside he was fractured, broken.

We’re all broken, Sarah. It’s not always about fixing the parts that don’t work; it’s about making the most of the ones that do.” I

I think there’s something wrong with my lungs. Maybe I have an allergy or hay fever. I think it might even be a fracture they forgot to fix. I worry about it a lot. I can picture the broken rib impaling my lungs, my heart.

Jethro thrust again and I rode my new friend the showerhead. “Oh, God. Yes,” I hissed, rocking harder. “Yes, yes…” A masculine cough sounded. “You continue to surprise me, Ms. Weaver; at least this time, I rather enjoy it.” Everything crashed into awareness. My daydream shattered, fracturing by my feet like broken glass. I squealed and dropped the showerhead. It turned into a water snake, spewing water left and right, wriggling like some terrible demon. Jethro snickered. “You’re using up the entire Hall’s supply of hot water. Are you planning on saving some for the rest of the inhabitants of my home?” I couldn’t. I can’t. The horror. The shame!

Broken, according to Webster’s Dictionary, means, to be fractured, upheld, discontinuous, or interrupted. In a way this is true with God; when He decides to break us, we become fractured, broken, and interrupted in our everyday ways. We will see situations—which we were looking forward to having fall into place—suddenly discontinued. Things will become dry, and people start falling away from us. Slowly, but surely, it will happen. Sometimes, it will not even come through us asking. When the Lord chooses to interrupt us, it will come to pass. However, this mainly happens when God is calling us or training us for ministry. We must always be in a place where we are able to listen to His voice while sensing His heart’s desire for our lives. He is not a toy we play with any time we become bored and uninterested. Many unbelievers in the past have tested Him and have paid a high price. The owner of the Titanic stood on the bow, cursed God, and shook his fist to Heaven in doubt and anger, dictating to the Lord that He couldn’t sink his ship. As you very well know, on the night of April 1912, a huge iceberg struck the ship and sank it,—as many have done in the past and still today.

I tell my students not to be frightened; in the history of Buddhism-for 2,500 years-no one has broken or fractured a leg because of sitting in meditation.

The room fractured into shards of colored light. Red… gold… green… and blue shimmered, then blurred into unrecognizable colors as they wound tightly around our bodies. Then everything exploded… the lights… the room… our bodies... into a million beautifully broken pieces.

But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women.

Look at you,” he said. “A fractured man, a broken thing. I asked for money to kill you, but none would give it. Now I understand why. There is no value to you. You’re nothing, and therefore nothing is what your life is worth. But I will kill you anyway, out of pity. I

I pulled him close, kissing his mouth firmly. Hard. Deep. Devouring and taking everything he had to give. Tears tasted salty on cracked, unforgiving lips. Fingers dug into skin. Nails scrapping flesh. Heavy breaths. Fractured hearts. We were healing. Or trying to. But can two people like us ever truly mend? I gathered his broken pieces and I held them tight. Yoss wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t be able to let go. ~Imogen Connor

She grinned faintly. “It was the night I touched your cheek, wasn’t it? I wasn’t very careful to hide my reaction.” I nodded. “You knew. I could see it on your face. You knew he had broken that bone.” “What bone?” Roarke asked, catching my eye. “Who broke what bone?” I took a shaky breath, but I didn’t look away. This was my truest friend, my greatest ally and my only love. If I couldn’t tell him, who could I tell? “My father. When I was eleven I made him angry. It wasn’t hard to do. He hit me over and over so hard that he fractured a bone in my face. You thought I was sick with a fever.” I smiled at him, trying to soften the angry look in his eyes. “You gave Mrs. Pomphel wild flowers to deliver to me. They were beautiful. They made me smile every time I looked at them.” “Did that hurt?” he asked gruffly. “To smile with your face broken?” My smile disappeared. I nodded minutely, unable to lie to him. This new silence wasn’t silence at all. It was a void. A vortex of Roarke’s rage that sucked the life and light from the world and dimmed it to darkness.

There are some phases of modern physical degeneration in which most of us take part with remarkable complacency. We would consider it a great misfortune and disgrace to burn up the furniture in our homes to provide warmth, if fuel were available for the collection. This is precisely what we are doing with our skeletons by a process of borrowing, simply because we fail to provide new body repairing material each day in the food. You are all familiar with the tragic misfortune that overtakes so many elderly people through the accident of a broken hip or other fractured bone. Statistics show that approximately 50 per cent of fractured hips occurring in people beyond 65 years of age never unite. We look upon this as one of the inevitable consequences of advancing age. In Chapter 15 I have referred to the small boy whose leg was broken when he fell in a convulsion while walking across the kitchen floor. That bone did not break because the blow was hard but because the minerals had been borrowed from the inside by the blood stream in order to maintain an adequate amount of the minerals, chiefly calcium and phosphorus in the blood and body fluids. He had been borrowing from his skeleton for months because due to a lack of vitamins he could not absorb even the minerals that were present in the inadequate food that he was eating. The calcium and the phosphorus of the milk were in the skimmed milk that he was using but he needed the activators of the butter-fat in order to use the minerals. Simply replacing white bread with these activators and the normal minerals and vitamins of wheat immediately checked the convulsions

When you haven’t yet had your heart really broken, the gospel isn’t about death and rebirth. It’s about life and more life. It’s about hope and possibility and a brighter future. And it is, certainly, about those things. But when you’ve faced some kind of death—the loss of someone you loved dearly, the failure of a dream, the fracture of a relationship—that’s when you start understanding that central metaphor.

She wasn’t free yet, but she would be. One day she’d forgive herself and live again.

the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive.

Nothing can fix a broken heart except love. Love always repairs those fractures we get in our heart.

The world was a broken mirror, fractured into impossibilities.

We've seen how beautiful it can be to follow Jesus into this new way of being human. But one of the things I love most about Jesus is how much He loves humanity in its brokenness. If He was surrounded by fractured people then, why would we expect it to be any different now? I actually think it is a larger mistake when we Christians attempt to pretend that our lives are more together than they really are in order to "manage our image" before the broader culture. Come look at our perfect church and our perfect family. And if you join us, maybe one day you, too, can have a perfect life! That kind of spin is a breeding ground for disappointment.

A culture of more ordered individualism was more valuable to people building from a foundation of stability than to those working to rise from entrenched disadvantage, or to overcome the burdens of broken homes and communities.

Do you remember what I told you? About the philosophy behind this? That something which is unique has its own beauty that can never be destroyed; that it’s always worth mending, even when it’s broken; and that the fractures and the scars become part of the beauty too, making the piece even more remarkable, even more precious.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m the kind of broken that won’t ever get put back together right.” … “I know that normal isn’t anything to strive for. But other times? I want it more than my next breath. I feel like I missed out on so much.” “Then you start fighting to get those pieces back.

The problem with trust is, once it's broken, it's hard to repair. Anything that threatens it again can take the fracture and break it in two, even if the truth isn't what you perceive.

This bipolar. This many-sided creature. This life of mine. This brain I was gifted. This brain that drains. This brain that protects me even as it scolds. This brain that is mine, in all its broken and fractured and bruised and bullied. This brain constantly in conference with the racing heart, reminding me to slow down, stay calm. We will not welcome the hurricane.

You act as if I’m talking a bunch of bullshit. If it was, it wouldn’t hurt so much. It hurts so much because it’s true. You know it’s true, otherwise you wouldn’t be crying right now.