Quotes About Fragility

Surviving" There are days when the fear of death is as ubiquitous as light. It illuminates everything. Without it, I might not have noticed this ladybird beetle, bright as a drop of blood on the window's white sill. Her head no bigger than a period, her eyes like needle points, she has stopped for a moment to rest, knees locked, wing covers hiding the delicate lace of her wings. As the fear of death, so attentive to everything living, comes near her, the tiny antennae stop moving.

Marriage, at first, may seem like it will last forever. But surprisingly, a lot of the times, it shatters easily. Like porcelain.

Earthly riches are like the reed. Its roots are sunk in the swamp, and its exterior is fair to behold; but inside it is hollow. If a man leans on such a reed, it will snap off and pierce his soul.

What is Man? A miserable little pile of secrets.

What is masculine and what is feminine, anyway? Why should men not show that they can be fragile or seductive? I am only happy when there is no discrimination.

Imagine a man who stands before a mirror; a stone strikes it, and it falls to ruin all in an instant. And the man learns that he is himself, and not the mirrored man he had believed himself to be.

Stop trusting in man, who has but a breath in his nostrils.

I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature.

I'm not a star, man. If a guy came in here and shot you and shot me, we'd both be two dead people. You understand?

Almost as miraculous as life itself was the number of ways it could end, or at least turn into a living hell.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines…every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Death is a guillotine blade hanging over our heads, reminding us every second of every day that this life we treasure so much is no more important to the universe than those of the two hundred thousand insects each of us kills with the front of our car every year.

Relationships were never equivalent: that was why it was so hard to find permanent ones. When two people depended on each other, they each had their own reasons. Sometimes the reasons balanced each other out temporarily, and the two of you were suspended gently in air. Then inevitably, one side came crashing down.

The Woman Who Forgot Everything But in old age all drifts in blurred immensities. The little things fly off and up like bees. You forgot all the words and forgot the object too; And reached your enemy a hand where roses and nettles grew.

The Abyss. Globalization had many economic benefits but, as in our own times, the creation of a truly international economic network combined greater efficiency with greater fragility. In 1914 a highly optimized system crashed in what was, without doubt, the biggest financial collapse of all time. (Unlike in 1929 or in 2008, the world's major stock markets were forced to suspend trading for no less than five months.)

Love is fragile. And we're not always its best caretakers. We just muddle through and do the best we can. And hope this fragile thing survives against all odds.

It's easy to break things. Much, much easier, it seems, than building them.

The natural world is not indestructible.

The minute I'm in a little pain ... your rough, tough, scary bad boy image totally falls apart.

I'm putting up a great front, then because I feel like I'm breaking apart inside.

Jonas. Their rock. Shattered into so many shards. Holding himself together through the sheer force of will.

In that moment he knew she could shatter him. Break him into a million pieces and he'd never recover. Not in this lifetime. He realized all the lore in his family was truth. Ferraro men. When then found the right woman, loved her with everything in them and they did it only once. Francesca was his once.

You need to allow yourself to fall apart. Just this once, when I am holding you close. Tomorrow night you can be strong again

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.