Jigsaw Puzzle Pieces Quotes

On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays 1. A beginning ends what an end begins. 2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full. 3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself. 4. The best time is stolen time. 5. All work is the avoidance of harder work. 6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing. 7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music. 8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear? 9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation. 10. Writer: how books read each other. 11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love. 12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything. 13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough. 14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear. 15. There are silences harder to take back than words. 16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery. 17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself. 18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. 19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism. 20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do. 21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of. 22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday. 23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open). 24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?

Your hand fits mine like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle

Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, ‘See what you can make out of these.

We weren't friends[...]We were more like jigsaw pieces, each of us part of the same big picture. There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can't quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we can't solve it alone.

Wouldn’t it have been wonderful, thought Woolly, if everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else’s. It would just fit snugly in its very own, specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become complete.

life is like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to see the whole picture, then put it together piece by piece!

The modern Westerner, persuaded that he has a right to "think for himself" and imagining that he exercises this right, is unwilling to acknowledge that his every thought has been shaped by cultural and historical influences and that his opinions fit, like pieces of jigsaw puzzle, into a pattern which has nothing random about it.

Maybe our lives are like gigantic jigsaw puzzles. You find the right piece and suddenly the whole picture has meaning.

The Knit-Wits have been her friends for years, and sometimes she still feels as if she’s a mistaken jigsaw piece who found her way into the wrong puzzle.

This is how we piece together our past. We do it like a jigsaw puzzle, where there are missing pieces. But so long as we have enough of the pieces, we can know what belongs in the gaps.

There’s a reason I hate jigsaw puzzles. I don’t have the patience to find all the border pieces, especially when they’re all the same shade of gray.

sometimes she still feels as if she’s a mistaken jigsaw piece who found her way into the wrong puzzle.

It's like I'm trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, and everyone is hiding the pieces from me.

God was a maze without a map, a circle without a centre; the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never seemed to fit together. If only she could solve this mystery, she could bring meaning to senselessness, reason to madness, order to chaos, and perhaps, too, she could learn to be happy.

From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

One more piece of sky in the jigsaw puzzle of our school.

When I first set out to ruin SNL, I didn't think anyone would notice, but i persevered because like you trying to a do a nine- piece jigsaw puzzle, it was a labor of love.

A choice is like a jigsaw puzzle, darling troll. Your worries are the corner pieces, and your hopes are the edge pieces, and you, Hawthorn, dearest of boys, are the middle pieces, all funny-shaped and stubborn. But the picture, the picture was there all along, just waiting for you to get on with it.

No man is fit to educate unless he feels each pupil an end in himself, with his own rights and his own personality, not merely a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, or a soldier in a regiment, or a citizen in a State. Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question but above all in education.

Parents and children. The simplest relationship in the world and yet the most complex. One generation passes to the next a suitcase filled with jumbled jigsaw pieces from countless puzzles collected over time and says, “See what you can make out of these.

We were more like jigsaw pieces, each of us parts of the same big picture. There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can’t quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we cannot solve it alone.

Ah yes, we live in uncertain times,” I chip in. “Life is a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with no picture to follow.

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.

In the end, he had to admit, he didn't really understand her. He didn't understand women. He didn't understand men. He didn't even understand children very well. All he really understood, he thought, was himself and the rest of the universe. Neither anything like completely, of course, but both well enough to know that what remained to be discovered would make sense; it would fit in, it could all be gradually and patiently fitted together a bit at a time, like an infinite jigsaw puzzle, with no straight edges to look for and no end in sight, but one in which there was always going to be somewhere for absolutely any piece to fit.

He compared the intelligence task to solving a jigsaw puzzle, except that you didn’t get the box cover, so you didn’t know what the final picture was. And you got only a few pieces at a time, not all of them. And even worse, you always got a bunch of pieces from some other puzzle thrown in.

Nora was eating a piece of cold duck with one hand and working on a jig-saw puzzle with the other when I got home. "I thought you'd gone to live with her," she said. "You used to be a detective: find me a brownish piece shaped something like a snail with a long neck." "Piece of duck or puzzle?...

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces aren't even fixed in shape. Yet, somehow, they all come together in the end to form the complete picture.

There are no extra pieces in the universe. Everyone is here because he or she has a place to fill, and every piece must fit itself into the big jigsaw puzzle.

I feel like a blank jigsaw puzzle with a thousand scattered pieces.

Discovering the laws of physics is like trying to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. We

God's will is like a jigsaw puzzle, sooner or later, all the pieces will fit together.

God's will is like a jigsaw puzzle until you put all the pieces together, you won't be able to see the whole picture.

God's will is like a jigsaw puzzle, you won't be able to see the whole picture until all the pieces are together.

You don’t stop doing a puzzle when you find two pieces that fit; you build around them, and the whole jigsaw hangs together better.

I love the English language, playing with words, watching sentences fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,

Myths and legends, either about divinities or the formation and history of peoples and races, began to look like pictures on a jigsaw puzzle, slightly different from one another but always built with the same pieces, though not in the same order.

I felt changed and a little crazy. But though I was still like a stained and slightly buckled jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, now there were at least a few border pieces in place.

We're humanity and no matter how individual or superior we think we are, we're part of a greater whole. We can't find completeness somewhere else any more than an individual part of a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle can. We all belong together and we always will. When we hurt each other what we're really doing is hurting ourself and damaging the world in which we all must live.

There is no one great man. Only millions of men and women in possession of tiny pieces of greatness, which when put together, when assembled in the aggregate make the whole. I am a piece of a very large jigsaw puzzle. One of the corner pieces. The one you go for first - important for a time, different from most of the others. But then, in the end, in the big picture, just one of many.

The right loved one will fill up your life like the final puzzle piece that makes it all complete. You feel it when you meet them. Or sometimes if you aren’t mature enough or wise enough, it can take time to discover that they are the right one. Once your jigsaw puzzle is complete, the rest are often just extra pieces.

I am torn in two but I will conquer myself. I will dig up the pride. I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me. Just like a jigsaw puzzle, I will put Him together again with the patience of a chess player. How many pieces? It feels like thousands, God dressed up like a whore in a slime of green algae. God dressed up like an old man staggering out of His shoes. God dressed up like a child, all naked, even without skin, soft as an avocado when you peel it. And others, others, others. But I will conquer them all and build a whole nation of God in me - but united, build a new soul, dress it with skin and then put on my shirt and sing an anthem, a song of myself.

A moody teenager, a divorcee with dreams to take off in a van, and an ageing actress. Such an unlikely combination. An odd bunch. Like pieces taken out of different jigsaw puzzles. They didn’t really belong together. And yet somehow they managed to fit.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if everybody life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one persons life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else.

I wanna make a jigsaw puzzle that's 40,000 pieces. And when you finish it, it says, 'go outside'.

No, like you’re a jigsaw puzzle and I have all the outside pieces but I haven’t worked out how all the inside ones fit together yet.

Every one of us is like the pieces of a puzzle. Each one unique and with our own special place where only we can fit, and without every one of us, the picture wouldn’t be complete.

3.Get to know all the different parts of yourself. Psychologically as well as physically, each of us is made up of many different pieces; we are human jigsaw puzzles.

Nothing is as satisfying as those moments of breakthrough when you discover something about yourself and the universe that adds another piece to the jigsaw puzzle. The joy of discovery is delicious.

In every jigsaw puzzle, there is one key piece, and the only tough job is to identify that key piece from the mess out there. “We have to identify that piece. The puzzle would never be completed without it

You will likely hear participants say such things as, “So that’s what you did?” “Oh, I forgot about that.” “So, when you did that, that’s when I did this. Now it makes sense.” Like a jigsaw puzzle that had been scattered with pieces missing, it all begins to come together as everyone adds their one or two pieces.

Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.

I had a blank canvas to fill with extraordinary possibilities, a fascinating jigsaw puzzle to piece together. It was a once-in-a-lifetime — a once-in-the-history-of-the-world-opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s.

Gracie’s memory was like a jigsaw puzzle with parts that didn’t always fit, but she’d found the all-important edge pieces. She was beginning to reframe her life—their life. It was a work in progress, but the image was coming together. “It’s

She goes off to see a shrink, to see if she can improve herself, make herself over into a new woman, one who no longer gives a shit. She would like that. The shrink is a nice person; Roz likes her. Together the two of them labor over Roz's life as if it's a jigsaw puzzle, a mystery story with a solution at the end. They arrange and rearrange the pieces, trying to get them to come out better. They are hopeful: if Roz can figure out what story she's in, then they will be able to spot the erroneous turns she took, they can retrace her steps, they can change the ending. They work out a tentative plot.

Criminal investigation has been loosely compared to many things, including the putting together of a jigsaw puzzle. It is seldom that simple. The pieces of such a puzzle are of a fixed shape, immutable. Men and women change shape when touched.

No probability, however seductive, can protect us from error; even if all parts of a problem seem to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, one has to remember that the probable need not necessarily be the truth, and the truth not always probable.

We were more like jigsaw pieces, each of us part of the same big picture. There are people like this wherever you go. They are part of the same mystery as you are, but you can't quite tell how you fit together. The world is a puzzle, and we cannot solve it alone.

There’s a feeling when you really get a handle on your plot that’s like when you’re getting to the end of a jigsaw puzzle and each piece you fit makes the next one fit faster. I love that feeling. Rewriting to add foreshadowing and strengthen the themes, that’s really fun.

That was the trouble with the supernatural, Vimbai thought--you didn't know what laws ruled it, and what was a coincidence and what was a sign and what was weird and what wasn't. It was like a whodunit, only the clues refused to be arranged into any sort of hierarchy or a straight narrative, and most of the time it wasn't even clear if they indeed were clues; a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were blank.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again. Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.

Before Mina, my life was like a complicated jigsaw puzzle. Mina's come along and pushed the puzzle upside down onto the floor. I have to start all over again, figuring out where the pieces go. But some of the pieces to the puzzle don't seem to fit the way they used to. The thought terrifies me.

That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's first American ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. He saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle, whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the last blank space on the table." "Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles." "Aw, shit.

Love isn't always easy, is it? That's because we're all different. We don't fit together as cleaning as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes there are gaps. Holes. The finished product when we come together isn't always perfect. But as we're reminded in Corinthians, a love that keeps no record of wrongs...that perseveres...never fails.

Now he was…dust. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected. Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers. But if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?

The whole thing is like a jigsaw puzzle, but there are too many missing pieces to solve it.

like a jigsaw puzzle you buy at a garage sale that’s been mixed up with pieces from twenty other jigsaw puzzles.

I wanna make a jigsaw puzzle that's 40, 000 pieces. When you finish it, it says 'go outside'.

God’s will is a jigsaw puzzle. Until you put all the pieces together, you can’t see the whole picture

But the tears of joy had washed anxiety away and lifted them to a height where nothing was impossible. Ryuji was as if paralyzed: the sight of familiar places, places they had visited together, failed to move him. That Yamashita Park and Marine Tower should now appear just as he had often pictured them seemed only obvious, inevitable. And the smoking drizzle of rain, by softening the too distinct scenery and making of it something closer to the images in memory, only heightened the reality of it all. Ryuji expected for some time after he disembarked to feel the world tottering precariously beneath his feet, and yet today more than ever before, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, he felt snugly in place in an anchored, amiable world.

Pages could be written on the immense losses of productive soil that occur annually in almost every continent of the earth; on lethal air pollution episodes in major urban areas; on the worldwide distribution of toxic agents, such as radioactive isotopes and lead; on the chemicalization of man's immediate environment—one might say his very dinner table—with pesticide residues and food additives. Pieced together like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, these affronts to the environment form a pattern of destruction that has no precedent in man's long history on earth.

I’ve discovered that the things that happen in my life make a lot more sense when I include God in the picture. It’s like trying to work a jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the front of the box. You can do it, but the task of putting thousands of tiny pieces together will sure go easier and make a lot more sense if you can take a peek at the bigger picture now and then.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces. There are a million ways in which it can be incomplete but there is only one way in which it is complete. Your mind thinks that it is a player with the mission to solve the puzzle of universe. The truth is that mind itself is the last piece of the puzzle. Surrender! Dissolve the mind and be one with the rest of the universe.

Blessed with fortune is the only way to describe my life. It’s like a big jigsaw puzzle, and I’m constantly looking for the right pieces to plug into the right spaces. They always seem to be there if I just look hard enough.

I say sister because we were never too alike, too competitive with one another, ever to bond as friends: like the projecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, our characters, by reason of their similar cuts, could never really lock.

A story is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle that would cover the whole floor of a room with its tiny pieces. Buts it's not that sort of puzzle that comes with a box. There is no lid with a picture on it so that you can see what the puzzle will look like when it's finished. And you have only some of the pieces. All you can do is keep looking and listening, sniffing about in all sorts of places, until you find the next piece. And then you'll be amazed where that next piece will take you. Suddenly your puzzle can have a whole new person in it, or it can go from being on a train to a hot air balloon, from city to country, from love to sadness to loneliness and back to love. Pieces can come to you at any time. When you're having a cup of tea or sitting on a bus or talking with a friend.it will be like a bell going off in your head. That's what comes next you'll think. And that's why it's serendipity. Serendipity is luck and chance and fate all tumbled into one.

Hardin lived in a world he manipulated day to day, you never knew when a piece of information might have a use. Life was a jigsaw puzzle someone had kicked apart on the day Hardin was born and he was still putting it back together a piece at a time.

The greatest puzzle is one not understood until the final piece is set in place. Life, appropriately, can be like that, all the pieces tumbling together in a slow dance until in one last joining of hands epiphany strikes. A History of the Jigsaw, by Icarus Salt

One way to think about epiphany is to imagine working on a jigsaw puzzle. When you put the last piece into place, is there anything special about that last piece or what you were wearing when you put it in? The only reason that last piece is significant is because of the other pieces you’d already put into place. If you jumbled up the pieces a second time, any one of them could turn out to be the last, magical piece. Epiphany works the same way: it’s not the apple or the magic moment that matters much, it’s the work before and after

In so far as I listen with interest to a record, it’s usually to figure out how it was arrived at. The musical end product is where interest starts to flag. It’s a bit like jigsaw puzzles. Emptied out of the box, there’s a heap of pieces, all shapes, sizes and colours, in themselves attractive and could add up to anything--intriguing. Figuring out how to put them together can be interesting, but what you finish up with as often as not is a picture of unsurpassed banality. Music’s like that." From “Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation” by Ben Watson, Verso, London, 2004, p. 440.

Wouldn't it have been wonderful if everybody's life was like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Then no-one's life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else's. It would just fit snugly in its very own specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become compete.

perceived the numbing truth that we human beings are merely as many pieces in a jig-saw puzzle and that our every movement affects the fortunes of some other piece. Just so, faintly at first and taking shape by degrees, must the germ of civic spirit have come to Prehistoric Man. We are all individualists till we wake up.

I’m a jigsaw puzzle with plenty of missing pieces.  But it doesn’t matter anymore. The jigsaw puzzle is still an illusion. All pieces, no pieces, or half of them missing,  what does it matter when it’s all an illusion. It might help to find all the right pieces, but then what? I still have to wake up. It’s all a dream, masterly put together.

I wonder why he hastened to tell us that George Hearne was buried in the churchyard, and then added that naturally he was!' 'It's the natural place to be buried in,' said I. 'Quite. That's just why it was hardly worth mentioning.' I felt then, just momentarily, just vaguely, as if my mind was regarding stray pieces of a jig-saw puzzle. The fancied ringing of the telephone bell last night was one of them, this burial of George Hearne in the churchyard was another, and, even more inexplicably, the ladder I had seen under the trees was a third. Consciously I made nothing whatever out of them, and did not feel the least inclination to devote any ingenuity to so fortuitous a collection of pieces. Why shouldn't I add, for that matter, our morning's bathe, or the gorse on the hillside? But I had the sensation that, though my conscious brain was presently occupied with piquet, and was rapidly growing sleepy with the day of sun and sea, some sort of mole inside it was digging passages and connecting corridors below the soil. ("Expiation")

Distraction. Obsession. Confoundment. She was all those things and more. She should’ve been a simple puzzle to break apart and piece back together, but she was proving more complicated than expected. She was like a jigsaw missing one piece. No matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find the missing piece, and until I did, she’d continue haunting my thoughts.

HOW DO WE put together the jigsaw puzzle of our lives? How do we find the right shapes and make them fit together so that they form an image we can recognize? It is not easy even when all the pieces are assembled in front of us and we have the picture on the box to compare it with. How much harder when we lack the solid, clear-cut corners to build out from. This

But in the meantime, as a temporary measure, I hold what I call the doctrine of the jig-saw puzzle. That is: this remarkable occurrence, and that, and the other may be, and usually are, of no significance. Coincidence and chance and unsearchable causes will now and again make clouds that are undeniable fiery dragons, and potatoes that resemble eminent statesmen exactly and minutely in every feature, and rocks that are like eagles and lions. All this is nothing; it is when you get your set of odd shapes and find that they fit into one another, and at last that they are but parts of a large design; it is then that research grows interesting and indeed amazing, it is then that one queer form confirms the other, that the whole plan displayed justifies, corroborates, explains each separate piece.

The question is, of course, is it going to be possible to amalgamate everything, and merely discover that this world represents different aspects of one thing? Nobody knows. All we know is that as we go along, we find that we can amalga- mate pieces, and then we find some pieces that do not fit, and we keep trying to put the jigsaw puzzle together. Whether there are a finite number of pieces, and whether there is even a border to the puzzle, is of course unknown. It will never be known until we finish the picture, if ever. What we wish to do here is to see to what extent this amalgamation process has gone on, and what the situation is at present, in understanding basic phenomena in terms of the smallest set of principles. To express it in a simple manner, what are things made of and how few elements are there ?

I'm not tormenting myself. I learned long ago that in order to heal my wounds, I must have the courage to face up to them. I also learned to forgive myself and correct my mistakes. However, ever since I started out on this journey, I've had a sense of being confronted by a vast jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which are only just beginning to revealed, pieces of love, hate, sacrifice, forgiveness, joy, and grief.

There isn’t a person out there who knows me. Who I truly am. Who I want to be. I’ve never had that special connection where I’m understood. It always feels like there’s a curtain between me and any person I’m talking to, and I worry I’ll always feel this separation from the world. Like I’m an extra piece to a jigsaw puzzle, discarded and forgotten under the couch, while everyone else clicks with their matching corners.

The two of them carefully stepped around the crime scene, picking up Nick’s arms, legs and organs, and brought them back to his head. They placed his extremities into position, and then pieced in the gorier bits, assembling a gruesome jigsaw puzzle. In a few moments, most of Nick’s body was in place. The healing process took about twenty minutes. Elphaba and John stood spellbound as they watched a bloody collection of body parts reintegrate into a human form. As Nick’s sinews, nerves, and muscle knit back into place, the gaping wound in Esperto’s body also closed, completing a few minutes before Nick’s healing. The panther form quickly shrank back to housecat just as Nick sat up. Esperto jumped in his lap and licked the remnants of blood off his face. “Thank you Esperto,” Nick said. He looked at Elphaba and John. “Well, that could have gone better.

In summary, the rather obscure laws of the weather are easy to understand once we view the earth from space. Thus the solution to the problem is to go up into space, into the third dimension. Facts that were impossible to understand in a flat world suddenly become obvious when viewing a three-dimensional earth. Similarly, the laws of gravity and light seem totally dissimilar. They obey different physical assumptions and different mathematics. Attempts to splice these two forces have always failed. However, if we add one more dimension, a fifth dimension, to the previous four dimensions of space and time, then the equations governing light and gravity appear to merge together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Light, in fact, can be explained as vibrations in the fifth dimension. In this way, we see that the laws of light and gravity become simpler in five dimensions.

She was fine. She was just…jumbly, as if her whole life was a jigsaw puzzle that had been put away in the wrong box, so she’d been trying to make a picture of a sunset with pieces that were meant to be a cow. And while the prospect of no longer trying to build a skyline out of hooves was enough to make her genuinely giddy—like when she’d been running through some poor farmer’s field with Anvita and Harry—she was also on the verge of resentful. Deeply, deeply resentful.

Initially, his theory was inspired by the observation that the shapes of continents like South America and Africa could be fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Continental drift then became more certain as fossils accumulated and paleontologists found that the distribution of ancient species suggested that the continents were once joined. Later, “plate tectonics” was suggested as a mechanism for continental movement, just as natural selection was suggested as the mechanism for evolution:

It is sleep that builds connections between distantly related informational elements that are not obvious in the light of the waking day. Our participants went to bed with disparate pieces of the jigsaw and woke up with the puzzle complete. It is the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). Or, said more simply, learning versus comprehension. REM sleep allows your brain to move beyond the former to truly grasp the latter.

These fields, which govern the interaction of all subatomic particles, are now called Yang-Mills fields. However, the puzzle that has stumped physicists within this century is why the subatomic field equations look so vastly different from the field equations of Einstein-that is, why the nuclear force seems so different from gravity. Some of the greatest minds in physics have tackled this problem, only to fail. Perhaps the reason for their failure is that they were trapped by common sense. Confined to three or four dimensions, the field equations of the subatomic world and gravitation are difficult to unify. The advantage of the hyperspace theory is that the Yang-Mills field, Maxwell's field, and Einstein's field can all be placed comfortably within the hyperspace field. We see that these fields fit together precisely within the hyperspace field like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle. The other advantage of field theory is that it allows us to calculate the precise energies at which we can expect space and time to foem wormholes.

Ollie hadn’t been kidding. He really did like jigsaw puzzles. A countryside harvest festival was spread across the coffee table, and its repeating autumnal patterns held him and Grandma Young in a matching trance. Perched on their seat edges, they bonded over etiquette and strategy: start with the border. Then any sections that contain printed words. If someone is searching for one specific piece, but the other person finds it, it must be handed over, because it means more to the first person. And always save the sky—the hardest part of any puzzle—for last.

Time is like a jigsaw puzzle," she said. "Imagine a giant box full of billions of pieces of millions of puzzles — that is the future. Beside it lies a huge board, partially filled with bits of the overall puzzle — that is the past. Those in the present reach blindly into the box of the future every time they have a decision to make, draw a piece of the puzzle out and slot it into place on the board. Once a piece has been added, it influences the final shape and design of the puzzle, and it's useless trying to fathom what the puzzle would have looked like if a different piece had been picked.

If we shuffle three colored quarks and the equations remain the same, then we say that the equations possess something called SU(3) symmetry. The 3 represents the fact that we have three types of colors, and the SU stands for a specific mathematical property of the symmetry. We say that there are three quarks in a multiplet. The quarks in a multiplet can be shuffled among one another without changing the physics of the theory. Similarly, the weak force governs the properties of two particles, the electron and the neutrino. The symmetry that interchanges these particles, yet leaves the equation the same, is called SU(2). This means that a multiplet of the weak force contains an electron and a neutrino, which can be rotated into each other. Finally, the electromagnetic force has U(1) symmetry, which rotates the components of the Maxwell field into itself. Each of these symmetries is simple and elegant. However, the most controversial aspect of the Standard Model is that it "unifies" the three fundamental forces by simply splicing all three theories into one large symmetry. SU(3) X SU(2) X U(1), which is just the product of the symmetries of the individual forces. (This can be compared to assembling a jigsaw puzzle. If we have three jigsaw pieces that don't quite fit, we can always take Scotch tape and splice them together by hand. This is how the Standard Model is formed, by taping three distinct multiplets together. This may not be aesthetically pleasing, but at least the three jigsaw puzzles now hang together by tape.) Ideally, one might have expected that "the ultimate theory" would have all the particles inside just a single multiplet. Unfortunately, the Standard Model has three distinct multiplets, which cannot be rotated among one another.

There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now. But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it's our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.

When I was in the doghouse, I felt as if I were assembling a jigsaw puzzle in which each piece had a specific place. Before I put the puzzle together, it all seemed incomprehensible to me, but I was sure that if I ever managed to complete it, the separate parts would each have meaning and the whole would be harmonious. Each piece has a reason for being the way it is, even Colonel García. At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously—as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space. That’s why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.