Quotes About Fragility

How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.

Yes, me, I prefer the hourglass so you can smash it when I tell you of eternity's lie —Paul Celan, "[Blinded by giant leaps]," Romanian Poems (Green Integer, 2003)

Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.

This shitty world sometimes produces a rose The scent of it lingers and then it just goes

The very strength of a nation eventually proves to be its weakness.

Highly organized complex societies are delicate machines. It does not take much to bring them to ruin. 'For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost', as the old rhyme has it. Civilizations based on ideology are even more fragile than most. As we know from twentieth-century history, once people stop believing in the system, the end is near; no amount of coercion can keep it going indefinitely.

An attitude of total acceptance and peace of mind doesn't come naturally to me. I must remain diligently on guard to prevent my feelings, thoughts and actions from being controlled by people and circumstances. My serenity, like finely spun glass, is extremely fragile. My natural tendency is to find fault, see the defect, disapprove, then not accept what I see. I completely forget that acceptance does not imply approval.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.

you looked at the bicycles one way, they looked very solid, like sculpture, with afternoon light glinting cleanly off the chrome handlebars—one, two, three, all in a row. If you looked at them another way, you could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants or like love itself.

There was a feeling, as you sat and ate your nice sandwich or had your tea, that you were on the slowly tipping edge of nothingness and might fall forward at any moment, and that if you did, it was possible that nothing would know you'd ever been there at all. Jim

He's like a human bomb with dozens of trip wires. Some of them I can see, but most are deeply inside him.

How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.

In old age her voice had become thin as a bird's, but her reading was still beautiful to him.

The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband's bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.

No es breve luz aquella caduca exhalación, pálida estrella, que en trémulos desmayos pulsando ardores y latiendo rayos, hace más tenebrosa la obscura habitación con luz dudosa?

Every human being on earth. It's difficult to understand. That people can hurt each other. When they have been so small and helpless. Every single rapist and football bully and suicide bomber and pedophile has been so small and depended. Of milk and love.

Isn't it fun,' she said and she smiled. I let the oars rest in the rowlocks. The water around the boat fell silent, and silently the cabin was floating up above the rocks and the smoke rose softly from the chimney, and how impossible it was to grasp that in the end something as fine as this could be ground into dust.

En av mine mange redsler er å bli mannen med den frynsete jakka og den uknepte buksesmekken foran kassa på Samvirkelaget, med egg på skjorta og mer til fordi speilet i gangen har slutta å virke. En havarert mann uten anker noe annet sted enn i sine egne flytende tanker der tida har mista sin rekkefølge.

When the lamp is shatteredThe light in the dust lies dead—When the cloud is scatteredThe rainbow's glory is shed.

A sensitive plant in a garden grew, And the young winds fed it with silver dew, And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light, and closed them beneath the kisses of night.

Oh,lift me as a wave,a leaf,a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life!I bleed!

forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings Give various response to each varying blast, To whose frail frame no second motion brings One mood or modulation like the last.