Quotes About Fragility

It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.

For the first time I could remember, I felt weak, woozy and stupid— like a human-being. Like a very small and helpless human-being.

A bag of meat that breathes, and when that stops, nothing but rotting garbage.

Deborah called the dispatcher and said, "I've got the Aldovar girl. I'm taking her home," and Samantha muttered, "Big whoopee-shit." Deborah just glanced at her with something that looked like a rictus but was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile, and then she put the car in gear, and I had a little over half an hour to sit in the backseat and picture my life splintering into a million decorative shards.

People don't usually bother me very much, since they are, after all, only flesh and blood, and I know very well just how fragile and transitory that is. But

flaccid weakness, and

It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.

Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities.

He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents' house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.

Az életek is úgy repednek meg, ahogy a jég. Személyiségek. Egyéniségek.

He was a boy composed of pieces just loosely held together, and the centrifugal spin of this latest terror could pull his loose bits apart. No magical belief in hummingbirds and glowworms could put him back together if that happened

was like a crystal bowl filled with warm kettle corn. But when you lifted it up and checked the bottom, you could see a layer of burnt, unpopped kernels. The kind that makes you flinch from the unexpected bitter taste. The kind that may cause you to chip a tooth.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you'd read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

I could have told him that nothing was safe and that no matter how careful you were and how hard you tried, there were still accidents, hidden traps, and snares. You could get killed on an airplane or crossing the street. Your marriage could fall apart when you weren't looking; your husband could lose his job; our baby could get sick or die.

don't rely too much upon that unsteady flicker.

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.

Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked. To

Why do we wrap things? Usually to protect them. The more fragile they are, the more important the wrapping. Your dream is prey to many perils. It may shatter under the blows of criticism, evaporate with competition's heat, sink to the bottomless depths of others' indifference. Tend to your dream. Protect it as you would a fallen nestling. Until the day when it—and you—will fly.

In our minds we tried to pin her to a corkboard like a butterfly, but the pin merely went through and away she flew.

In the utter darkness he felt himself to be nothing but ears and fingertips. He could feel Nipper's heartbeat, putt-putting away behind the toothpick ribs like a tiny motor scooter. He could feel the cold, golden gaze of the trophy pigeon two rooms away. The silence of the house at night was not total. Somewhere a clock was ticking. Cricks and creaks came from nearby and distant quarters, as if the house were twitching in a sleep of its own.

And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegrated and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden's surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing. For

That terrible awareness that life could twist on you in a blink wasn't something a person could forget.