Quotes About Fragility

And so he goes on dwindling away maybe through too much prayer is now too rarefied to touch or settle anywhere

living in the slippery maybe the last green places are you listening

The robin brushes me at dusk. Our good bones fail. We leave no mark. His voice, she writes, was clear and quiet. I hear him singing in the dark. ("Edward Thomas' Daughter")

Nature wanted to show mankind, an irreverent, over-venturesome mankind, just how puny and pitifully helpless a thing mankind really is…

Sometimes it slanted against her window with a pinging sound, which meant it was close to hail, and then it was visible as tiny pellets for a moment on the pane before the pellets vanished and rolled quietly down the glass, each drop leaving its own delicate trickle. At other times it fell straight down, hardly touching the window at all, but still there beyond the glass, like a delicate, beaded curtain at the entrance to another room.

There's no time to hold grudges when you've seen how fragile things can really be.

Outside, with Labor Day having come and gone, summer is fighting a dying battle against the fall air. The leaves are hanging perilously on the trees, knowing full well they're going to make the plunge, clinging on as if they stand a chance not to. The garbage smell that has wafted around us for the better part of August is dissipating, ushered out with the humidity, and in its place a briskness is filtering in, like something you'd smell from a bottle of Tide.

I knew that none of us are made any promises, none of us are ordained to be here forever, or even for as long as we want to believe. This is what nearly being robbed of time does to you: it leaves you glancing over both shoulders, wondering when it will catch up to you, wondering when its pace will quicken so you can no longer outrun it.

I feel like I'm caught in time, caught in a perfect moment inside a snow globe that maybe I'd beg my mom for at a gas station, and I can't find my breath, and my knees feel a little wobbly, and I try to remind myself to remember this moment, to hold on to it forever, to seal it up like we really are in that snow globe and to never let anything shatter the bubble that envelops us, that protects us from everything else around us in the outside world.

I've seen Joe Solomon every school day for more than a year, but I don't think I'll ever really know him. There are times when he's one of the strongest people I've ever known, and then there are moments--like this one--when I think he might be broken, deep down, in a place that will never mend.

I know too well how dangerous hope can be, how it grows and sometimes dies, taking its host with it.

For the first time he's not looking at me like I'm dangerous. He's looking at me like I'm broken. It's a look I know too well.

In a single breath, reality as you know it can simply fall away.

Los churros se cayeron al suelo cuando me abrazó, y no hicieron ruido. Tampoco hizo ruido lo que hasta entonces había sido mi vida, pero se cayó al suelo, igual que ellos".

The death of a collaborator gives us an unnerving premonition that a like violence—a heavy or sharp tool that slips, an automobile collision, a microbe—could abruptly befall us in our time and space of work and reason, and could annihilate, along with our future, the significance of our past.

Me parecía que ambos éramos almas perdidas que se aferraban la una a la otra, buscando a tientas la sensación de peso y de piel entre las manos, tratando de convencernos de que no éramos simplemente dos fantasmas que se evaporarían para integrarse con la fría neutralidad de nuestras sábanas.

Si svegliò al canto degli uccelli, con la bruma del primo mattino che saliva oltre l'erba alta dov'era sdraiata. Sul volto erano impressi i segni delle margherite schiacciate, i fiorellini richiusi sotto il viso fragile.

Don't you understand that girls die the day they begin puberty ? Worse than that, they die without disappearing.

Si tu admires ta propre joliesse dans le miroir, que ce soit dans la peur et non dans le plaisir : car ta beauté ne t'apportera rien d'autre que la terreur de la perdre.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don't kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

Men are actually the weaker sex.

I've had knee trouble, and I worry about my shoulder, but I think my weakest link is my head. A helmet can only do so much, and I have seen the effects of brain injuries. That is a big fear. I think everyone's weakest link is their brain because it's their most fragile link.

The individual source of the statistics may easily be the weakest link.

The main threads running through the lives of W. A. Clark and his daughter Huguette include the costs of ambition, the burdens of inherited wealth, the fragility of reputation, the folly of judging someone's life from the outside, and the tension between engaging with the world, with all its risks, and keeping a safe distance from danger.