Discontinuity Quotes

“Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music.”
― Ross David Burke, When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia

“There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.”
― Paul Bowles, The Spider's House

“the essential feature of the Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity,or perception”
― American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR

“[...] Sans entrer encore dans la question de la « composition du continu », on voit donc que le nombre, quelque extension qu’on donne à sa notion, ne lui est jamais parfaitement applicable : cette application revient en somme toujours à remplacer le continu par un discontinu dont les intervalles peuvent être très petits, et même le devenir de plus en plus par une série indéfinie de divisions successives, mais sans jamais pouvoir être supprimés, car, en réalité, il n’y a pas de « derniers éléments » auxquels ces divisions puissent aboutir, une quantité continue, si petite qu’elle soit, demeurant toujours indéfiniment divisible. C’est à ces divisions du continu que répond proprement la considération des nombres fractionnaires ; mais, et c’est là ce qu’il importe particulièrement de remarquer, une fraction, si infime qu’elle soit, est toujours une quantité déterminée, et entre deux fractions, si peu différentes l’une de l’autre qu’on les suppose, il y a toujours un intervalle également déterminé.”
― René Guénon, The Metaphysical Principles of the Infinitesimal Calculus

“But now, discontinuity ruled. Yesterday meant nothing and could not help you build tomorrow. Life had become a series of vanishing photographs, posted every day, gone the next. One had no story anymore. Character, narrative, history, were all dead. Only the flat caricature of the instant remained, and that was what one was judged by. To have lived long enough to witness the replacement of the depth of her chosen world's culture by its surfaces was a sad thing.”
― Salman Rushdie, Quichotte

“I'm not stoned now, Jack,' she said quietly. 'I'm straight, maybe straighter than I've ever been in my life. We all go through changes. I watched you go through yours, and I couldn't take it. Now I think I've gone through one of my own, a big one. It happens like that sometimes, six years of things just happening to you but not really getting through to your head, and then something, acid plus something, maybe something silly and meaningless triggers the big flash, and suddenly all those six years come through all the way at once and you feel them, feel the years before too, and all the possible futures, all in a moment, and nothing's happened in that moment that anyone else can see, but you're just not the same you anymore. There's a gap, a discontinuity, and you know you can't go back to being what you've been but you don't yet know what you are.”
― Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron

“Each moment, as I lived it, had already been used up. I could not connect things together. They happened to me, they had already happened to me. The helix that spans from birth to death, the unbroken thread of habit and progress that makes a person a person, a self whole and entire, had become as discontinuous and insubstantial as a chain of smoke rings.”
― Hari Kunzru, White Tears

“An altogether different temporality is inherent in information. It is a phenomenon of atomized time, namely of point-time. [...]

Atomized time is a discontinuous time. There is nothing to bind events together and thus found a connection, a duration. The senses are therefore confronted with the unexpected and sudden, which, in turn, produces a diffuse feeling of anxiety. Atomization, individualization and discontinuity are also responsible for various forms of violence.”
― Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering