Puzzle Pieces Fitting Together Quotes

Getting to know someone is like putting a never-ending puzzle together. We fit the smallest pieces first and we get to know ourselves better in the process.

contiguous, adj. I felt silly for even mentioning it, but once I did, I knew I had to explain. "When I was a kid, "I had this puzzle with all fifty states on it--you know, the kind where you have to fit them all together. And one day I got it in my head that California and Nevada were in love. I told my mom, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I ran and got those two pieces and showed it to her--California and Nevada, completely in love. So a lot of the time when we're like this"--my ankles against the backs of your ankles, my knees fitting into the backs of your knees, my thighs on the backs of your legs, my stomach against your back, my chin folding into your neck--"I can't help but think about California and Nevada, and how we're a lot like them. If someone were drawing us from above as a map. that's what we'd look like; that's how we are." For a moment, you were quiet. And then you nestled in and whispered. "Contiguous." And I knew you understood.

I've always known we were two puzzle pieces that fit together in a hollow that is our pain. There was a time when I was certain we were too damaged not to destroy each other. Now I think we are saving each other.

Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It's not like a puzzle piece where there's an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.

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.

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle- the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.

What initially began as a couple of pieces that fitted together from first dates, slowly expands with time and for a moment the puzzle actually looks like it will be realized. Heartbreak is when the puzzle is nearly finished and you suddenly realize that pieces are missing. Perhaps they were never in the box in the first place or perhaps they went missing along the way; regardless, the puzzle remains undone. You frantically search the box and your surroundings, desperately trying to find the missing pieces, anxiously looking to fill the void, but you search for what cannot be found.

It was as if I had thought all along I was a complete picture, and Sam had revealed that I was a puzzle, and had taken me apart into pieces and put me back together again. I was acutely aware of each distinct emotion, all fitting together tightly.

How do you know when you're There, I had once wondered. Maybe you're lucky enough to notice the moment it's happening to you. Maybe you're able to block out all the other stuff that is, in the end, just background noise. But, most often, you don't know that you were There until you lose it, or until it gets taken away from you. When you look back, you clearly see that time, that place, when all the pieces of you had finally fit together to make you blissfully happy, make you your whole self. Like one of those jumbo puzzles that take up your entire kitchen table for weeks, the tiny pieces are just cardboard shapes with colors splashed on them, and they don't make any sense until you find their rightful place among the other pieces. When you put the last piece into place and the pieces now form a complete picture, that's when you're There. But while you were busy thinking about gluing the puzzle together, so that the pieces would never be apart again, someone comes from behind you, destroys the last piece and throws the rest of the pieces away. Even if you could muster up enough courage to put the pieces back together, the picture would never be complete again, because of the last missing piece...which, as it turned out, was smack in the middle, or in the heart, of the picture.

I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

The second he slipped inside of me, all I'd doubted, questioned, or feared evaporated, leaving me with one single, definite truth--I'd fallen in love with him in an all-consuming blaze that would blind me if I wasn't careful. We fit together like poorly cut puzzle pieces, but when the edges joined and were positioned just right, our scattered images came together to create a solid, deliberate piece of art, completely crystal clear and in focus. I was a goner.

Families are like puzzles. They fit together in a certain way, and if one piece is missing, it throws everything off.

I used to think of two people in love like that. Like puzzle pieces, fitting together. But it's not like that at all. Love pulls a part of you out, and it pulls a part of him - like taffy, stretching but not separating. The tendrils of each one wrap around the other, until they meld together. One, but not quite. Separate, but not quite.

No one would have guessed that the jagged pieces of our soul fit the puzzle in this box. We were considered the left over remnants that had no place, except the picture we wanted to create together.

I wish this was a love story. A love story about lovers whose mouths meet like two puzzle pieces fitting perfectly into place, about the electric feeling of one person's name on the other's tongue because no one has ever spoken them out loud like that before. About people who spend the night together looking at the stars until entire constellations exist within them. Everyone is perfect in that indistinct way most characters are and every perfectly constructed scene in their fictional lives is somehow more real than anything you've known or lived. Love stories, romances, leave a person secure in the knowledge they'll end Happily Ever After and who wouldn't want a story like that? I wish this was a love story because I know how it goes in one like mine, where the only moments of reprieve are the spaces between its lines.

Because some information is better than no information. Life does not give you big, simple answers, Caitlyn. It demands patience, focus, and an open, intelligent mind to gather the pieces of a puzzle and fit them together into a coherent whole. Nothing worth knowing is ever easily learned.

That they were left with only this--this awkward, prearranged meet-up, this terrible silence--seemed almost more than she could bear, and the unfairness of it all welled up inside of her. It was his fault, all of it, and yet her hatred for him was the worst kind of love, a tortured longing, a misguided wish that made her heart hammer in her chest. She couldn't ignore the disjointed sensation that they were now two different pieces of two different puzzles, and nothing in the world could make them fit together again.

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.

We fit together like puzzle pieces when we snuggled together.

She didn't really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didn't fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of picture she was making.

my final piece We’re born into the world As just one small piece to the puzzle That makes up an entire life. It’s up to us throughout our years, to find all of our pieces that fit. The pieces that connect who we are To who we were To who we’ll one day be. Sometimes pieces will almost fit. They’ll feel right. We’ll carry them around for a while, Hoping they’ll change shape. Hoping they’ll conform to our puzzle. But they won’t. We’ll eventually have to let them go. To find the puzzle that is their home. Sometimes pieces won’t fit at all. No matter how much we want them to. We’ll shove them. We’ll bend them. We’ll break them. But what isn’t meant to be, won’t be. Those are the hardest pieces of all to accept. The pieces of our puzzle That just don’t belong. But occasionally . . . Not very often at all, If we’re lucky, If we pay enough attention, We’ll find a perfect match. The pieces of the puzzle that slide right in The pieces that hug the contours of our own pieces. The pieces that lock to us. The pieces that we lock to. The pieces that fit so well, we can’t tell where our piece begins And that piece ends. Those pieces we call Friends. True loves. Dreams. Passions. Beliefs. Talents. They’re all the pieces that complete our puzzles. They line the edges, Frame the corners, Fill the centers, Those pieces are the pieces that make us who we are. Who we were. Who we’ll one day be. Up until today, When I looked at my own puzzle, I would see a finished piece. I had the edges lined, The corners framed, The center filled. It felt like it was complete. All the pieces were there. I had everything I wanted. Everything I needed. Everything I dreamt of. But up until today, I realized I had collected all but one piece. The most vital piece. The piece that completes the picture. The piece that completes my whole life. I held this girl in my arms She wrapped her tiny fingers around mine. It was then that I realized She was the fusion. The glue. The cement that bound all my pieces together. The piece that seals my puzzle. The piece that completes my life. The element that makes me who I am. Who I was. Who I’ll one day be. You, baby girl. You’re my final piece.

I guess it means we don't understand everything, and we're not going to. Maybe the whys aren't answered here. Not because there aren't answers, but because we wouldn't understand the answers if we had them. Maybe there's a bigger purpose, a bigger picture that we only contribute a very small piece to. You know, like one of those thousand piece puzzles? There's no way you can tell by looking at one piece of the puzzle what the puzzle is going to look like in the end. And we don't have the picture on the outside of the puzzle box to guide us. Maybe everyone represents a piece of the puzzle. We all fit together to create this experience we call life. None of us can see the part we play or the way it all turns out. Maybe the miracles that we see are just the tip of the iceberg. And maybe we just don't recognize the blessings that come as a result of terrible things.

Understanding life is like trying to put together a puzzle with pieces that don't fit.

I feel like my life is made up of tiny puzzle parts that no longer fit together. Imagine working on a puzzle only to find that the final picture can never be complete because one of its pieces is missing. This is exactly what's happened to my life; it has become impossible to put it back together.

When I was far from Füsun, the world troubled me; it was a puzzle whose pieces were all out of place. The moment I saw her, they all fit back together, reminding me that the world was a beautiful, meaningful whole where I could relax.

My life's a tangle of past and present, like two separate puzzles with their pieces tumbled together. Nothing fits.

Our hands fitted together like the interlocking pieces of a puzzle.

We're going to get through this. Every relationship has a hard part at the beginning. This is our hard part. It's not like a puzzle piece where there's an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.

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.

Maybe everyone represents a piece of the puzzle. We all fit together to create this experience we call life. None of us can see the part we play or the way it all turns out. Maybe the miracles that we see are just the tip of the iceberg. And maybe we just don't recognize the blessings that come as a result of terrible things.

It felt like a puzzle, mostly put together but with a piece missing, waiting to be filled. There were plenty of pieces to fill it- gay, straight, bisexual- but none fit quite right. Sometimes I thought I could make one fit if I pressed hard enough, but it would never lie flat. The word asexual took the puzzle piece and turned it, letting it click into place where before it'd been better to just leave the space empty. I wasn't broken. I wasn't empty. I wasn't nothing at all. Just a little differently shaped.

Like we were just jagged puzzle pieces that made no sense alone but together we fit perfectly. That's what life is supposed to be like for normal people right? You find that other piece that matches yours that completes yours. And you make the jags and the crevices fit, even if they don't go in perfectly smooth, even if they require a few adjustments. You don't demand perfection you make it work and appreciate the parts that fit instead of obsessing about the small angles that don't.

Life's like a puzzle. Everyone is given one piece. Sometimes you connect with someone or something that has an interlocking part. As time goes by, you’ll see that picture taking form, and you’ll be amazed how beautiful it is. God will never tell you how many pieces it takes or how to complete the puzzle, but when you meet Him in heaven, you’ll see that everything fit together perfectly.

In the literary machine that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over.

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

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

The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

We fit together like custom pieces from a two person puzzle. And therefore, you are exactly my perfect kind of nice.

We fit together perfectly, pieces of a puzzle snapping into place.

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.

They fit together like puzzle pieces, and the thought made a pain erupt inside of me that I could hardly bear. This was the field that I had planted. With my very own hands. And then I'd left it all to rot.

Nothing in her life makes sense. All she craves is for the pieces of the puzzle to fit together again. She is sure one day it will happen. She just doesn’t know when. She can’t fight injustice alone – for that, she needs her friends.

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.

And my heart shatters for the second time today. It’s blown apart into so many pieces, the shrapnel spread so far and wide, I know what remains will never fit back together again. Puzzles don’t work when you only have half of the pieces. Same goes for hearts. I

Willow Mosby, when I look at you, all of the broken pieces fit back together.

That weird, unexplainable quality that made two people fit together like the only matching puzzle pieces in the world.

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.

There are moments when something happens, and puzzle pieces that didn’t connect before now fit together

They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle

The world is vaster and more beautiful than she ever described. Each corner of it feels different and unique, part of a puzzle with disparate pieces that somehow fit together.

Each and every prayer is a tiny piece of a great cosmic puzzle, which when fitted together will allow for the completion of the grand picture of the Almighty Lord's plan for humanity and the universe.

Similarly, the total output of human creativity, in all its kaleidoscopic breadth, pieces together the fabric forming our culture. The underlying intention of our work is the aspect allowing it to fit neatly into this fabric. Rarely if ever do we know the grand intention, yet if we surrender to the creative impulse, our singular piece of the puzzle takes its proper shape. Intention is all there is. The work is just a reminder.

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

Instead of having a well-integrated sense of who they are, emotionally immature people are more like an amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don’t go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parents’ reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together.

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.

I had injected more of myself than I had ever intended into our nonexistent relationship. Now I would have to relocate the bits and pieces of myself that I had lost, and put myself back together, like a waterlogged puzzle whose pieces didn't quite fit anymore.

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.

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.

A lie: 'Opposites attract.' The truth? Magnets attract. Opposites fit together like (fucked up) puzzle pieces. And when you're fucked up, there are more important things than attraction. Like distraction. Like destruction. Opposites distract. Opposites destroy. Opposites decimate. Opposites detonate. Opposites are fun as hell, until they aren't.

It’s not like a puzzle piece where there’s an instant fit. With relationships, you have to shape the pieces on each end before they go perfectly together.

Manifesting our visions into reality is just like a puzzle. First we take a good look at a picture of the end result, hold onto it, and then set out to fit together the pieces.

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.

We're the gray area, angel. We're the pieces of the puzzle they don't know what to do with, the pieces that don't quite fit into their perfect little picture, so they choose to discard us, to keep their image untainted, but we can only be ignored for so long. Because eventually, whether they want to admit it or not, all of their black and white will bleed together anyway.

PEOPLE ARE LIKE puzzle pieces. Put together, the shapes make a picture. And a friend is the one whose shape fits into your shape—fits perfectly because it is different, opposite, like a key in a lock, or a foot in a shoe.

just because you feel a connection with them does not mean they are right for you the hard truth is that you need more than a spark to build a home attraction is common, but fitting together like two pieces of a puzzle is rare

Well, it’s all a kind of puzzle, isn’t it? You start out with your own little set of pieces you’re trying to fit together, then you get married and it’s a lot more pieces, way more than double in my opinion, and next thing you have kids and all of a sudden there are too many pieces for the table, and more showing up every day.” He gave a small dry laugh. “I suppose the Buddhists and them would say you just got to appreciate the ever-changing thinginess of the puzzle.

And so this end in confusion, where when things stop I never get to know it, and this moving is the space, is that what is yet to be, which is for others to see filled wherever it may finally be in the frame when the last pieces are fitted and the others stop, and there will be the stopped pattern, the final array, but not even that, because that final finitude will itself be a bit of scrolling, a percent clump of tiles, which will generally stay together but move about within another whole and be mingled, with in endless ways of other people's memories, so that I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else's frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their downtime, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren, I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made from this world, even though the fleeting tenants of those bits of colored glass have vacated them before they have had even the remotest understanding of what it is to inhabit them, and if they -- if we are fortunate (yes, I am lucky, lucky), and if we are fortunate, have fleeting instants when we are satisfied that the mystery is ours to ponder, if never to solve, or even just rife personal mysteries, never mind those outside-- are there even mysteries outside? a puzzle itself -- but anyway, personal mysteries, like where is my father, why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simple even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.

You make the puzzle work. Without you, we’re just a bunch of pieces that look like we belong together, but no matter how hard we try to hold on to each other, we fall apart. You’re the glue. You’re the fifth piece that makes everything fit just right.

He was the easiest person to be around that I’d ever met. He’d burrowed into my life and set himself up like he had always been a part of my world. We were a puzzle made of two pieces, and when we fit together, all the sharp edges of life seemed squared off, blunted.

Everything melts away. All that I know is this kiss; all that I feel is his lips pressing into mine. I become dizzy from want, need, and the lack of oxygen. Our lips, our bodies, our souls, have always fit perfectly together—like two pieces of a puzzle. Alexia Grant More Layers

Wanting All Husband, it's fine the way your mind performs Like a circus, sharp As a sword somebody has To swallow, rough as a bear, Complicated as a family of jugglers, Brave as a sequined trapeze Artist, the only boy I ever met Who could beat me in argument Was why I married you, isn't it, And you have beaten me, I've beaten you, We are old polished hands. Or was it your body, I forget, maybe I foresaw the thousands on thousands Of times we have made love Together, mostly meat And potatoes love, but sometimes Higher than wine, Better than medicine. How lately you bite, you baby, How angels record and number Each gesture, and sketch Our spinal columns like professionals. Husband, it's fine how we cook Dinners together while drinking, How we get drunk, how We gossip, work at our desks, dig in the garden, Go to the movies, tell The children to clear the bloody table, How we fit like puzzle pieces. The mind and body satisfy Like windows and furniture in a house. The windows are large, the furniture solid. What more do I want then, why Do I prowl the basement, why Do I reach for your inside Self as you shut it Like a trunkful of treasures? Wait, I cry, as the lid slams on my fingers.

I want to run, to flee, to wake from this never-ending nightmare. But my body is frozen, my heart numb. Jagged pieces of the puzzle scatter across the corners of my mind, and fitting them together is futile. Threads of truth are still missing, exposing the gaps between what’s real and what’s fabricated.

Vertebrate brains and objective reality do not fit together like the pieces of a puzzle, for the simple reason that we ourselves create every idea from our own ‘objective reality.’ ‘Real reality,’ outside our perception, inevitably remains a construct, and each of us has to decide where God figures in it.

Maybe everyone represents a piece of the puzzle. we all fit in together to create this experience we call life. none of us can see the part we play or the way it all turns out. Maybe the miracles we see are just the tip of the iceberg. and maybe we just don't recognize the blessings that come as a result of terrible things.

I've heard people describe marriage as two missing pieces of a puzzle coming together, and discovering that they are a perfect fit. But that's just wrong. People are different and that's a good thing. Two pieces of different puzzles cannot and will not fit together, unless one has been forced to bend or break or change to fit the other

They were scent mates, and she couldn’t deny it any longer — puzzle pieces that were only whole when they were fitted together, and it didn’t matter if he didn’t love her or if there were other women; didn’t matter what she did with other men. They were only whole together, and she would do whatever she needed to keep him chasing her forever.

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

Funny thing, time, how it all fit together despite such arbitrary beginnings and endings, the whole of it played out and calculated down to the very second, each breath, every sunset, dream and waking moment designed, the beat of every heart accounted for, each life a preordained piece of a much larger puzzle, a precisely measured unit in the infinite vacuum of space and time.

I imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.

There was more small talk, more laughing, sidelong glances, more of the unspoken physical friction that makes each new conquest so delightful. In the air was the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in. There was something in Emile tonight, a touch of seriousness, a chemical magnetism, that met my mood the way two pieces of a child's puzzle fit together.

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 ?

Darce and Jill were an odd couple—especially when we all were kids. Darcy was short and small with chin-length black hair. My wife was always cute and approachable. Jill was as tall as most boys. Her straight blond hair cascaded down to her butt. She floated through the high school hallways like a goddess. I would have never dreamed of speaking to her back then. As adults, Jill was the one who was always nervously telling jokes and Darcy was the one who was always quick to laugh, throwing her head back and roaring with her mouth wide open. My wife was easy to please and Jill was a pleaser. Jill’s looks often made other girls self-conscious but my wife was always very comfortable in her own skin. Jill was impulsive. Darcy was thoughtful. All of the Jill and Darcy puzzle pieces just naturally snapped together. For every tab, knob, and loop one had, the other had a corresponding blank, hole, or socket. They were a perfect fit.

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:

You’ve been brave for her a lot, haven’t you?” He says it as if it’s dawning on him, as if he’s fitting a piece of the puzzle together. He’s not wrong. That’s what a good mother does. I’ve always known that life is a series of disasters waiting to happen. Mama was always desperate or barely hanging on or losing it. I don’t see why Mia has to think of things that way. I want her to pick herself up and dust herself off. Get mad instead of scared. I don’t want her to see me as pushed around. Powerless.

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.

The truth was that a complex murder case attracted his attention and curiosity like nothing else on earth. He could make up reasons for it. He could say it was all about justice. About rectifying an imbalance in the scheme of things. About standing up for those who had been struck down. About a quest for truth. But there were other times when he considered it nothing but high-stakes puzzle-solving, an obsessive-compulsive drive to fit all the loose pieces together. An intellectual game, a contest of mind and will. A playing field on which he could excel.

had. All put together, it made for a puzzle where none of the pieces fit smoothly. She felt as though she were trying to fit pieces together that showed trees, sky, half a cat, and part of a barn door. All together they didn’t make a picture. She knew what the images were, but none of them was complete, and she didn’t feel whole, either. She reminded herself that she didn’t need a man to be complete. But so much of the relationship she had with Phil was constantly half-assed. Maybe that was all she needed to know, and eventually act on. There never seemed to be

Conceivably, though, the sea might have filtered into her body over the years in tiny fragments like the parts of a picture puzzle which, while she'd never identified the whole, had pieced themselves together as the sea in all its sparkling radiance. An internal sea. Untouched by anyone... Having drunk too much, the mother was beginning to drift off with the sound of the children's high-pitched voices in her ears. Fragments of the sea... Could she trace the matrix into which she'd fitted them all the way back to the flood of light she'd experienced at the moment of birth? The light was pain. She didn't actually remember that time, of course. She'd thought she was reminded of it when she heard the first cries of her own children: yes, she'd thought then, it was painful and dazzling, and I couldn't help crying. With every cry I was longing to accustom myself to the flood of light. But before my body had time to adjust, the light had ceased to exist as light. Perhaps what I was seeing was the brightness of the internal sea? My mother's sea. There were other memories. The tale of the Little Mermaid she'd come across in a foreign picture book. Though it would never have occurred to her to see herself in the person of the lovely little princess, she'd been haunted by the idea that perhaps she had been present herself, somewhere in the deeps where the princess lived. She sensed the sea's wan bluish gleam in the Little Mermaid's sobs.

I drape my arm around his shoulder. We sit together like that for a moment, until something bright floating in the lake catches my eye. I lean over the dock gently to pick it up. It's a little sprig of morning glory, the flowering vine Naomi bemoaned. "If you left, everyone would miss you," Jimmy says softly. "Everyone would be sad. But not me. No one even cares that I'm here." "That's not true," I say. "I'd miss you." He smiles. I hold up the little vine I've rescued from the lake. A drop of lake water falls from one of its white blossoms onto my dress. "Every person, every thing, has a purpose in this life. You, me, this little morning glory. We're all interconnected." Jimmy pauses to look at the flower in my hand. "It's our job to remember that and to realize how it all works together, even when it feels like the puzzle pieces don't fit.

put it down here for you as though I had been an eyewitness. My information was fragmentary, but I’ve fitted the pieces together, and there is enough of them to make an intelligible picture. I wonder how he would have related it himself. He has confided so much in me that at times it seems as though he must come in presently and tell the story in his own words, in his careless yet feeling voice, with his offhand manner, a little puzzled, a little bothered, a little hurt, but now and then by a word or a phrase giving one of these glimpses of his very own self that were never any good for purposes of orientation. It’s difficult to believe he will never come. I shall never hear his voice again, nor shall I see his smooth tan-and-pink face with a white line on the forehead, and the youthful eyes darkened by excitement to a profound, unfathomable blue.

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.

What are the path of love and the path of meditation? There are basically two different paths to enlightenment. These two paths are The path of love and The path of meditation. The path of love is the female path to enlightenment and The path of meditation is the male path to enlightenment. The path of love is the path of love, joy, relationships, devotion and surrender. The path of meditation is the path of meditation, silence, aloneness and freedom. These two paths has different ways, but they have the same goal. Through love and surrender the person that walks The path of love discovers the inner silence. Through meditation and aloneness the person that walks The path of meditation discovers the inner source of love. These two paths are like climbing the mountain of enlightenment through different routes, but the two paths are meeting on the summit of the mountain - and discover an inner integration between love and meditation, between relating and aloneness. Before I accept to work with a student now, I make an intuitive and clairvoyant evaluation about which spiritual paths that the student has walked before in previous lives. This intuitive assessment gives information about the spiritual level that the student has attained, and it also makes it easier to guide the person spiritually if he has followed a certain path in the past. A female student of mine laughed recently when I told her that she had followed The path of love in several past lives. She commented: "You have told me three times now that I have walked the path of love and silence, but with my head I still do not understand it." But this overall assessment of her spiritual growth uptil now, and of the spiritual paths that she had walked, made all the pieces of her life puzzle fit together - and brought a new, creative light to all her life choices in her current life. A male student of mine, who was a Tibetan monk in a previous life, walks The path of meditation, and I notice how I change my language and the methods that I recommend when I guide him along the path of meditation. I now work with students who walk both The path of love and The path of meditation, which also allows me to discover a deeper integration of love and meditation on my path to enlightenment.

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

table sat an antique ormolu clock, its hands frozen on the twelve and the ten, 11:50. The magic hour. The time when Zee’s ghosts appeared in the greenhouse wall. Bits and pieces of two scenarios were coming back to her, fitting together like a child’s jigsaw puzzle. She had, indeed, come to this place—Mathew Brady’s New York studio—a short time earlier to have her portrait made

Life has a way of revealing a side of itself that no rightful mind would expect. It’s like a maze, or pieces to a puzzle, fitting together like the speckled tile beneath my feet—white blocks with spots of gray. In the end, all you are left with are random patterns,

I’ve already begun to outline, cholesterol—no matter which “kind”—is not as terrible as you’ve been taught to believe. Some of the most remarkable studies of late on the biological value of cholesterol—and for brain health in particular—clue us in on how the pieces to this puzzle fit together and tell a coherent story. As we’ve seen, science is only recently discovering that both fat and cholesterol are severely deficient in diseased brains and that high total cholesterol levels in late life are associated with increased longevity.24 The brain holds only 2 percent of the body’s mass but contains 25 percent of the total cholesterol, which supports brain function and development. One-fifth of the brain by weight is cholesterol!

Indulge me for a minute. This won’t take long. I want to use a scenario to set the stage for our discussion about parenting. For starters, I’ll need you to pull up a chair on one of the sides of this card table I’m looking at. You’ll notice that it is crowded with tiny pieces of an elaborate jigsaw puzzle. You can tell—just by looking at the colors and designs on the pieces—that this is going to be a bit of a challenge. Before you tear into this project, though, there are a few things you need to know about what you’re looking at: → The border pieces have all been removed. I know it’s easier to start a jigsaw puzzle by putting the edge pieces together to form a border. That gives you an early sense of accomplishment before you move on to the difficult stuff. Sorry. You’ll have to decide the boundaries of this puzzle for yourself. → Somebody threw a couple of handfuls of pieces from a different puzzle into the box. They may look like they belong to this one, but they don’t. They won’t fit no matter how hard you try. And because you don’t know which ones they are, you could waste a lot of time before you find out. Are you ready to start putting the puzzle together? I realize I’ve complicated matters for you, but you’re fairly resourceful. Given enough time and enough soothing medication, you could probably figure it out. All you need is the picture on the box cover and you can begin. Oh, I forgot to mention something: We lost the cover to the box. You’re just going to have to guess what this picture puzzle is supposed to look like. Does this sound like fun? I can’t speak for you, but I’d rather get my gums scraped. If anything, this puzzle project sounds more like a sick joke. It’s tough enough when you have all the right pieces, all the edge pieces, and the picture on the box. Take those things away, and it’s anybody’s guess what you’ll come up with. Not only that, but without a clear picture of what you are trying to put together, you’ll never really know if you even came close to what it was supposed to be.

But what I knew in my head stayed up there, swirling about the other ten zillion things I had retained. That knowledge informed my actions, what I did and how I did it. What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she was—what I have since come to call the Infinite Migration. If my wonderings about life were scientific, bent toward examination and physical discovery, Emma’s all leaned toward matters of the heart. While I could understand and explain the physics behind a rainbow, Emma saw the colors. When it came to life, I saw each piece and how they all fit together, and Emma saw the image on the face of the puzzle. And every now and then, she’d walk me through the door into her world and show it to me.

The proceedings of these ecumenical councils remind me of the experience of sitting down at a table before a large, thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. Many of us know how frustrating it can be to keep trying piece after piece that looks like it should fit, but it doesn’t. I have even been guilty of trying to force a piece into the wrong space, even though I know only one will be a true fit. Eventually, I find the proper puzzle piece that provides an exact fit. Likewise, the delegates to the Council of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon were seeking to be faithful to the hundreds of Christological “pieces” found in the texts of Scriptures. It was their unenviable task to put the whole “picture” of Christ together for the very first time in such a way as to find a perfect match for every piece. At times, various groups presented “pieces” they believed were a proper fit regarding the humanity or deity or natures or wills of Christ, but, in the end, each was declared to be improper fits. The proceedings of these councils did more to declare which pieces were not true pieces of the puzzle and should be discarded, than to provide a final, definitive statement of Christology that would silence all future discussions. We may know that the “Arius,” “Nestorius,” and “Eutyches” pieces do not fit the Christological puzzle, but this is not to say that a final and complete picture emerged.