Quotes About Precariousness

You already know the end result… laid off, fired, no retirement, no benefits, no security and certainly no comfort.

I think that of the three of us, I alone have no food supply, said the kzin.

In the world of structural unemployment no one can feel truly secure. Secure jobs in secure companies seem to be the yarn of grandfathers' nostalgia;

There was too little solid ground under one's feet.

The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

Oft times a blade across the room beyond the reach of a hand means that death is nearer. I

On what slender threads do life and fortune hang.

What use for? asks my mother, jiggling the table with her hand. You put something else on top, everything fall down.

The world has many edges, and all of us dangle from them by a very delicate thread. The key is not to let go.

I have a horror of rest; possessions encourage one to indulge in it, and there's nothing like security for making one fall asleep; I like life well enough to live it awake, and so, in the very midst of my riches, I maintain the sensation of a state of precariousness, by which means I aggravate, or at any rate intensify, my life. I will not say I like danger, but I like life to be hazardous, and I want it to demand at every moment the whole of my courage, my happiness, my health...

By the time Chester was born in i9o9, an agricultural depression, race riots in northern and southern cities, and nearly a thousand lynchings had further aggravated the precariousness of black lives.

us. I felt like a drop of rain in a spiderweb, and I was careful not to slide down.

If you're one car accident away from poverty, you're on a high wire without a safety net. And that's a challenging proposition.

The impending possibility that it will fall apart one day is torture—often worse than the actual disaster.

If any of us die tonight, it won't be from cold or suffocation—it'll be from hitting the ground too fast. Have I mentioned we aren't wearing parachutes?

Thus the diffuse character attributed to terrorism is reproduced in an enveloping atmosphere whose effect is to arouse a primal fear about the precariousness of every moment in daily life, to surround the most taken-for-granted routines with uncertainty.

I suffer from the sense that everything good in my life is about to go away.

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.

To live in any true sense of the word is to reject others; to accept them, one must be able to renounce, to do oneself violence, to act against one's own nature, to weaken oneself; we conceive freedom only for ourselves - we extend it to our neighbours only at the cost of exhausting efforts; whence the precariousness of liberalism, a defiance of our instincts, a brief and miraculous success, a state of exception, at the antipodes of our deepest imperatives.

Precariousness is not just a working-class thing.

You can die merging onto the freeway. You can choke on your take-out salad.

When we come to see the superlatively extreme precariousness of our existence, and begin to understand how by any accounting, we ought not to exist, what are we to think or feel? Our existence seems to be not merely a virtually impossible miracle but the most outrageous miracle conceivable, one that makes previously amazing miracles seem like almost nothing. It's