Quotes About Fragility

All the dreams I'd allowed myself to imagine were nothing but pages swept away by the wind.

Once you know how completely and suddenly the earth can open up at your feet and the worst can happen, it also, paradoxically, leaves you more afraid of everything else.

Morta? - repetiu Sophie. Ela teve o tolo impulso de acrescentar: Mas estava viva a uma hora! No entanto, se conteve, porque a morte é assim: as pessoas estão vivas até que morrem.

A fragile thing, brittle-looking, an objet d' art, round and perfect: but for how long? From far enough out in orbit, one has no doubt that one could drop the Earth on the floor of night and break it. An urge arises to step softly, to speak quietly, so as to keep whoever might be carrying the pretty toy from being startled and fumbling it.

a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die.

it can't afford to be hard. it won't allow itself psychologically.

I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense. •

A hundred canes shattered in the sun, like a load of antihistamines falling out of an airplane.

what in God's name was the thrust of that vast expanse of displaced water doing to those stones and to the centuries-old binding that kept them in place? Suddenly the air was unbreathable as a capricious gust blew the ship's exhaust down on them for a few seconds.

What fools men are to raze a city, destroying tombs, and temples, and sacred places, when they are so soon to die themselves.

People die, sure," my mother was saying. "But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.

I'd unboxed so much china from funeral sales and broken-up households that there was something almost unspeakably sad about the pristine, gleaming displays, with their tacit assurance that shiny new tableware promised an equally shiny and tragedy-free future.

It's awful being a child," she said, simply, "at the mercy of other people.

I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inhuman, blood-red shelves of cloud that suggested end-times footage of catastrophe and ruin: detonations on Pacific atolls, wildlife running before sheets of flame.

But poor Andy—even before he was skipped ahead a grade—had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like 'noxious' and 'chthonic' in casual conversation.

Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

La gente muore, questo è un dato di fatto» diceva la mamma. «Ma il modo in cui perdiamo le cose è insensato e terribile. Per incuria. Incendi, guerre. Il Partenone utilizzato come un magazzino per le munizioni, ma ci pensi? Tutto ciò che sopravvive alla Storia dovrebbe essere considerato un miracolo.»

They really knew how to work this edge, the Dutch painters?ripeness sliding into rot. The fruit's perfect but it won't last, it's about to go. And see here especially," she said, reaching over my shoulder to trace the air with her finger, "this passage?the butterfly." The underwing was so powdery an delicate it looked as if the color would smear if she touched it. "How beautiful he plays it. Stillness with a tremble of movement.

But it's so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that anything we manage to save from history is a miracle.

Whenever you see flies or insects in a still life—a wilted petal, a black spot on the apple—the painter is giving you a secret message. He's telling you that living things don't last—it's all temporary. Death in life. That's why they're called natures mortes. Maybe you don't see it at first with all the beauty and bloom, the little speck of rot. But if you look closer—there it is