Quotes About Fragility

Nonetheless, as the defects in a complex system increase, the time comes when just one more defect is enough to impair the whole, resulting in the condition known as frailty. It happens to power plants, cars, and large organizations. And it happens to us: eventually, one too many joints are damaged, one too many arteries calcify. There are no more backups.

In each case the results were consistent. When, as the researchers put it, "life's fragility is primed," people's goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It's perspective, not age, that matters most.

young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.

Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.

It wasn't like he was holding me so much as trying to hold onto something.

I'm a sunflower with a cracked petal.

The walls are cracked and water runs upon them within threads without sound, black and glistening as blood.

The Universe is picking us off one by one. Yesterday part of the poop deck went, and with it all the toilets.

Vidi che la banconota era tutta stropicciata, come l'assegno di Fefelli quel giorno a scuola, ma era una cosa diversa. I soldi si trasformano, a seconda delle mani che li accolgono, pensai. In certe mani diventano mattoni, in altre farfalle

One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb.

Through his suffering, he peers into the core of things and sees that the judgment of man is thistle-down in the wind.

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history. ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*?

Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out. We're still helping each other.

We never know. Any day could be the day we go down, and we never know.

I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust...

Having a breakdown was like breaking a vase and then gluing it back together. You could never trust yourself to handle that vase again with any surety. You couldn't put a flower in it because flowers need water and water might dissolve the glue. Am I crazy, then?

That— we seemed to have decided without saying a word— might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy.

You don't worry about dropping the eggs until you're almost home.

Look not long at what's offered, for every precious thing has wings and may fly away.

Oh, I suppose all men of intelligence know how fragile such things as Law and Justice and Civilization really are, but it's not a thing they think of willingly, because it disturbs one's rest and plays hob with one's appetite.

At three in the morning the gaudy paint is off that old whore, the world, and she has no nose and a glass eye. Gaiety becomes hollow and brittle, as in Poe's castle surrounded by the Red Death. Horror is destroyed by boredom. Love is a dream.

God's a connoisseur of fragile things, and decorates His cloudy outlook with ornaments of finest glass.

You are a dust with beautiful spirit.