Quotes About Fragility

I am late,' she said, 'I know that I am late. So many little things have to be done when you are alone, and I am not yet accustomed to being alone,' she added with a pretty little sob which reminded me of a cut-glass Victorian tear-bottle. She took off thick winter gloves with a wringing gesture which made me think of handkerchiefs wet with grief, and her hands looked suddenly small and useless and vulnerable.

Everyday life seems so permanent and unshakable?but, as I was reminded by these writers, it can be destroyed by a single phone call.

The human capacity for horror is a fickle thing, my friends, and hangs over an abyss by a frayed thread.

How bright we all bur. No wonder we were not made to last.

treachery, weakness, envy, fanaticism—the most destructive forces available to man.

I knew that my life, there and then, was no more than a handful of sand squeezed into my clenched fist.

The tears, when they came, slipped from he closed eyelids like so many beads on a prayer chain. Some women cry easily. The tears fall as gently as fragrant raindrops in a sun-shower, and leave the face clear and clean and almost radiant. Other women cry hard, and all the loveliness in them collapses in the agony of it.

We're not just polluting a river and killing a couple of top predator animals; we're eradicating the krill, the necessary algae. We're dismantling the insect and amphibian worlds. We're going for the building blocks.

For like four or five months of my life I was too scared to like, move around and reach out for things because I was worried that I'd my hands would run into glass, like I could reach up and if I reached up and knocked on the air it would make a noise. I couldn't look at the sky because I was worried that I see a crack.

The war was an escape to reality... The only thing that mattered were human relationships; not money, not position, not even family... Only relationships with people who might be dead tomorrow were important. It is a sort of wonderful state of mind. It's too bad it takes a war to create such a condition among men.

Life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon. You could still be hit by the proverbial bus tomorrow.

I honestly feel it could all end tomorrow. Not just the band thing - I mean life.

My parents always taught me never to take anything for granted because it can be taken away from you like that, especially when it comes to looks. I could get into a car crash tomorrow and disfigure my face. So I have to stay grounded.

My father died when I was only five years old, and that was the moment when I learned a cruel lesson that tomorrow, in fact, might not be another day.

As an artist, you put so much into what you do and it can all be torn down in a nanosecond.

there's gonna be a riot before this thing is over. A riot, or worse. Folks don't realize how fragile the social order is, I'm telling you.

We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world.

He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

I could feel myself melting away. I thought I was like water but I had no cup to hold me.

All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty.

Children may feel epic and large to theyselves and yet be only scraps to view.

It is a strange thing how quickly the body dies. How fragile a force our presence is. In an instant the soul is gone—leaving an empty, insignificant vessel in its stead.

I lowered my gaze from the sky to the trees and caught sight of the cast-off skin of a cicada falling to the ground. I'd heard somewhere that cicadas only had a lifespan of a few weeks. Their precious, short life was spent braving the heat of summer, single-mindedly calling out for a mate, then, when they finally stopped singing, they slipped from that tree that had been their home and returned to the ground. They leave behind the only home they've ever known and die.

I hated myself for being cold and hard. Little Sister loved me more than I loved her. I was the tree that had stretched its foliage over the entire kingdom of her life. She was a stowaway who had huddled in the safety of my shade. Without me, she would wither and dry up.