Quotes About Fragility

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life, bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam, combined with steel and wire and pollen to make up your firm and delicate being. Pablo Neruda's epitaph for Tina Modotti

In you I waver, fall and rise up burning. You among all beings have the right to see me weak.

There are three principles to remember if you are to teach a human being anything, and they are consistency, consistency, consistency.They are such fragile creatures to begin with, with poor eyes, poorer hearing, and no sense of smell left to speak of, it's no wonder they are made of fear. Some centuries ago they moved inside and with that move went nine-tenths of their intuition. It is almost unmerciful to make them live so long when they spend their lives in so much pain.

Mi smo kao orah.Moramo biti slomljeni da bi nas upoznali.

It's humbling to be reminded that no matter how big your life is, you are still a speck of dust that can be swept off this earth in half a second.

Nothing so affects a small town as the loss of its rarest and finest man. Nothing so affects a southern family as the death of the man who lent it balance and fragility in a world askew with corrupt values. His faith had always been a form of splendid madness and his love affair with the world was a hymn of eloquent praise to the lamb who made him.

In that place things begin to wear away even as they are built; the living die a little more each day. The sun is too far away; light slides endlessly into night; fire and love consume themselves; the heart tries to warm itself with ashes.

The human world is a cold and bitter place: nothing lasts in it. You must know that by now…. What did you imagine you were doing in those two rooms? Trying to turn yourself human?" "Yes," Corbet said, so simply that for a breath he rendered his father incapable of moving.

All writers are, somewhere or other, mad. Not les grands fous, like Rimbaud, but mad, yes, mad. Because we do not believe in the stability of reality. We know that it can fragment, like a sheet of glass or a car's windscreen. but we also know that reality can be invented, reordered, constructed, remade. Writing is, in itself, an act of violence perpetrated against reality.

Even the pearl at her earlobe looked alive, like a drop of water that a touch might destroy.

The flowers you gave me—they died.

It might destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol's body beside her, and the bend of Carol's body in the black sweater seemed the only solid thing in the world.

You're about as weak as a match. Carol held it burning for a moment after she lighted her cigarette. But given the right conditions, you could burn a house down, couldn't you?

an aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick…

There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.

She feels ugly when she cries, like a tomato breaking open

even the Pyramids and other "great works" were as ephemeral as a castle of sand on the beach at Brighton.

Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse—their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity—but

Years vanish. Months collapse. Time is like a tall building made of playing cards. It seems orderly until a strong gust of wind comes along and blows the whole thing skyward. Imagine it: an entire deck of cards soaring like a flock of birds.

They shake hands and all my past selves stretch between them like a fragile chain of paper dolls.

I waved but couldn't answer, because I was finally letting myself grin as wide as I'd wanted all afternoon, all evening, every sec of every minute with you, Ed. Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it'll get dropped someday, shoes that'll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you'll soon enough muck up filthy.

Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it'll get dropped someday, shoes that'll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you'll soon enough muck up filthy.

I'm nothing, not a single thing. The only particle I had, the only tiny thing raising me up, is that I was Ed Slaterton's girlfriend, loved by you for like ten secs, and who cares, so what, and not anymore so how embarrassing for me.

It's why we broke up, Ed, a small thing that's disappeared or maybe was never really in my hands in the first place.