Quotes About Fragility

You'd think a house would last forever, but the truth is a strong wind or a wrecking ball can devastate it. The family inside is not so different.

It's a good life lesson, whether or. it you ever work with wolves, Edward.No matter what you do for someone- no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or go him food so he's not hungry- make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you could become someone unrecognizable.

when you loved someone, you didn't want to be the one who brought their world crashing down.

A human heart breaks harder when it's dropped from a greater height.

Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he'd promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again.

No matter what you do for someone-no matter if you feed him a bottle as a baby or curl up with him at night to keep him warm or give him food so he's not hungry-make one wrong move at the wrong moment, and you become someone unrecognizable.

Parenthood was like awakening to find a soap bubble in the cup of your palm, and being told you had to carry it while you parachuted from a dizzying height, climbed a mountain range, battled on the front lines. All you wanted to do was tuck it away, safe from natural disasters and violence and prejudice and sarcasm, but that was not an option. You lived in daily fear of watching it burst, of breaking it yourself. Somehow

There it was, shiny and silver, pinned to the requisite position on his chest-a shield that covered his heart but had not been able to protect it.

Any smidgen of emotion revealed would crack the careful mask of control and leave the person in pieces.

Driving home, I am struck by the sudden thought that the world is inflatable, trees and grass and houses ready to collapse with the single prick of a pin. I have the sense that if I veer the car to the left, smash through the picket fence and the little Tykes playground, it will bounce us back like a rubber bumper.

Things that break—be they bones, hearts, or promises—can be put back together but will never really be whole. And

Gardens by their very nature are fragile beings that live in the two dimensions of time and care.

Most people had no idea there was only a thin veneer between their comfortable lives and the end of civilization as they knew it.

Babies had a way of casually destroying things.  They had a lot in common with earthquakes and rabid dogs that way.

Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin's ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak.

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

He had a special fondness for the moving parts of women, their wrists, their butterfly-shaped ankles, their shoulder blades like a swan's folded wings. In particular he treasured their knees, especially the back of them, where the skin was pale, milk-blue, with delicate fissures, little fine cracks, as in the most fragile old pieces of bone china. — John Banville, April in Spain (Hanover Square Press, 2021)

What you learn is often determined by what you need to know. If you think you're weak, you will learn that you are strong. If you think you are indestructible, you will learn that you are fragile. In the end though, you will learn that you are human. You are no more and no less than all those who are learning their lessons as you learn yours.

Jock put his shoulder to the framework and the whole thing crumbled inward with a crash of glass. Rotten as touch-wood, he said. This place would never stand a siege.

all the little rags of honest impulse and stumbling kindness with which we try to shelter ourselves from the winds of space.

Why? What had she ever done? What had any of them ever done? To give a child only to take him away. To make and then unmake, as if a family weren't built of lives but of things that could be broken, returned, thrown out--

Hearts are breakable. Even when you heal, you're never what you were before.

I guess when your heart gets broken, you begin to see the cracks in everything.

I'm not a candle so you could see through me, watch me burn, then blow me out.