Quotes About Fragility

The earthquake, however, must be to every one a most impressive event: the earth, considered from our earliest childhood as the type of solidity, has oscillated like a thin crust beneath our feet; and in seeing the laboured works of man in a moment overthrown, we feel the insignificance of his boasted power.

Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment's lost attention, and it's all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.

You philosophers, however raised above your own bodies you may be, must really not forget we poor worldlings have bones to be broken.

The young man till thirty, never feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the fragility of life; but he brings it not home to himself, any more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imagination the freezing days of December.

Once a heart breaks…it doesn't just grow back. It's not a lizard's tail. It's more like a huge stained glass that shattered into a million pieces, and it's not going back together. Least not the way it was. You can mush it all into one piece, but that doesn't make it a window. That makes it a pile of broken colored glass. Shattered hearts don't mend and they don't heal. They just don't work that way.

Fucking netbooks; you can't even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.)

An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis.

The life of this world is wind Windblown we come, and windblown we go away. All that we look on is windfall. All we remember is wind.

she was clinging ivy, she needed people to hold her up.

We make our heroes out of clay.

The tenuousness of modern life can make anyone feel overwrought.

Fortune is like glass - the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.

You realize mortality is everywhere.

It's always been intriguing to me, the loveability of mortality.

I've always been aware of mortality because I've always had ill health most of my life.

How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead

people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead.

On our hunger to control and know everything humans break and spoil

So far, you have read of the deaths of 557,017 people – one of whom was killed by a streetcar, one of whom died of bronchitis and one of whom died in a barn with her rabbits.

Beauty is a nonviolent experience of near death, a warning that one is fragile, like everything else in the universe.

I call this double truth of a thing its fragility, the inner fragility of a thing is why a thing can exist at all. Fragility is also why anything at all can happen. Existence is incompleteness. This fragility is activated in what is called destruction.

Maybe beauty is death, in a way, just like the decadent aesthetes used to say. It's a reminder that things are fragile, because when one thing envelopes another thing, that other thing might be overwhelmed or destroyed.

My innocence is a dying flower

A petal falling, never to bloom again A petal in flames, full of beauty