Quotes About Fragility

Sa main ouverte posée sur mon bras préfigure un avenir multiforme et unique, main rayonnante et unie aux phalanges courbées, cassées, d'une légèreté de plume et qui ont, pour moi, la nouveauté d'une fleur.

Her eyes are closed, but she is very far from being asleep. Even the shape of her face is altered, different. Her features are shrunken, aged. She has suddenly become what she, as she is, would be if she were ugly.

We lose track of everything, and of everyone, even ourselves. The facts of my father's life are less known to me than those of the life of Hadrian. My own existence, if I had to write of it, would be reconstructed by me from externals, laboriously, as if it were the life of someone else: I should have to turn to letters, and to the recollections of others, in order to clarify such uncertain memories. What is ever left but crumbled walls, or masses of shade?

Qualsiasi felicità è un capolavoro: il minimo errore la falsa, la minima esitazione la incrina, la minima grossolanità la deturpa, la minima insulsaggine la degrada.

All that blooms must fall.

She wept easily. This did not mean that she felt things more deeply than others did. It certainly did not mean that she was fragile or sentimental or ready to bring that sodden leverage to bear on the slights that came with being the baby of the family.

Material things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay. There are some I dearly wish might be spared.

She was an old woman, but she managed to look like a young woman with a ravaging disease.

That wind! ...it called to mind the small, scarce, stemmy flowers that she and Edmund would walk half a day to pick, though in another day they would all be wilted. Sometimes Edmund would carry buckets and a trowel, and lift them earth and all, and bring them home to plant, and they would die. They were rare things, and grew out of ants' nests and bear dung and the flesh of perished animals.

And everything is vulnerable to harm, one way or another. Everybody is vulnerable. It's kind of horrible when you think about it. All that breakage, without so much as an intention behind it half the time. All that tantalizing fragility.

things are so vulnerable to the humiliations of decay.

He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention, and then put them in his pockets, where he kept his jackknife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.

The wind blows a milkweed puff and two seeds do not fly.

When did he first notice that in himself, that little fascination with damage and its consequences? He might alarm her. He might mean to alarm her. Doing damage to this fragile night because it was such an isolated thing, an accident, with a look of meaning about it and no meaning at all.

el primer día que pudo ponerse de pie a los pocos pasos se desplomó al suelo, exhausto, en un estado de debilidad que no recordaba haber sentido antes.

la idea de que la civilización no era, no había sido nunca un movimiento, un estado de cosas general, un ambiente que abrazara al conjunto de la sociedad, sino diminutas ciudadelas levantadas a lo largo del tiempo y el espacio que resistían el asalto permanente de esa fuerza instintiva, violenta, obtusa, fea, destructora y bestial que dominaba el mundo

Maybe she was really good at improv. I couldn't be certain she was nineteen or that her name really was Nora Halliday. Maybe she was like one of those sweaters with an innocent little thread hanging off of it: One pull, the whole thing unraveled.

Life hangs from so slender a thread. Life is but a sigh..

La vie ne tient qu'à si peu de chose, la vie n'est qu'un soupir ...

Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.

No matter what we do, he taught, we cannot sustain the illusion of our self-sufficiency. We are all subject to decay, old age, and death, to disappointment, loss, and disease.

To flaunt your strength is to make it your weakness.

when I'mstanding on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of housesand cars and people below me and my head is so full of all these things thatI'm afraid that I'm going to forget to stand up straight and hang on to the railand I'm going to fall over and be killed.

As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.