Fragility Quotes

“Or maybe it's just that beautiful things are so easily broken by the world.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Fallen Angels

“The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.”
― Paulo Coelho, Eleven Minutes

“Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“It occurs to me that the peculiarity of most things we think of as fragile is how tough they truly are. There were tricks we did with eggs, as children, to show how they were, in reality, tiny load-bearing marble halls; while the beat of the wings of a butterfly in the right place, we are told, can create a hurricane across an ocean. Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkable difficult to kill.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Those candle flames were like the lives of men. So fragile. So deadly. Left alone, they lit and warmed. Let run rampant, they would destroy the very things they were meant to illuminate. Embryonic bonfires, each bearing a seed of destruction so potent it could tumble cities and dash kings to their knees.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“They sit here in the darkness, trusting. That the coffee will be hot and unpoisoned. That no raging madman will come in with a gun or bomb.

It leaves him breathless at times, how much faith people put in one another. So fragile, the social contract: we will all stand by the rules, move with care and gentleness, invest in the infrastructure, agree with the penalties of failure. That this man driving his truck down the street won't, on a whim, angle into the plate glass and end things. That the president won't let his hand hover over the red button and, in moment of rage or weakness, explode the world. The invisible tissue of civilization: so thin, so easily rendable. It's a miracle that it exists at all.”
― Lauren Groff, Arcadia

“...sometimes we go, and we try, and we suffer, and despite it all, we learn nothing. Sometimes we are left with more questions than when we started. Sometimes we do harm, despite our best efforts. We are human. We are fragile.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“If we are to remain relevant, we must create innovative social and economic ecosystems that become stronger under stress and through shocks.”
― Roger Spitz, The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume II - Essential Frameworks for Disruption and Uncertainty

“If I told you the few things keeping me alive,
Don’t run, don’t laugh, don’t cry.
Just forgive me for being soft in life,
I am one of those things that die”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Friendships are fragile and must be protected, because once broken, they can’t always be fixed.”
― Eloise Smith, Winner Takes Gold: an all-action gymnastics story for ages 10+

“The sun sets and it is another reminder of the sheer fragility of time, a reminder that death and decay are always closer than we think”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“[...] A diet of constant, stimulating activity is the best prescription for our troubles. It keeps the brain in a state of constant change, flow, confirmation, and anticipation, thereby reducing the noise, fragility, self-doubt, and stagnation with which we all have to contend.”
― John J. Ratey, A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain

“Can I propose a toast to the fragility of life and the weight of mortality?”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Nights

“Le donne vengono definite l'altra metà del cielo, mi sono sempre chiesto il perché. Adesso so che è perché le donne non sono tanto la metà di cielo che ci manca, ma quella che ci mette in comunicazione con una parte di noi che troppo spesso ci neghiamo, e questa parte non sta né in cielo né in terra, ma ben nascosta dentro, seppellita sotto tonnellate di stronzate. Per questo le donne non ci completano, ma ci cominciano, mentre noi uomini a volte le finiamo, ed è questa la vera tragedia. Lo facciamo da sempre con quel che più ci spaventa: la possibilità di diventare davvero liberi.”
― Matteo Bussola, La vita fino a te

“If it were enough for him to be fragile, patient, passive, if the fear (the fear provoked by nothing), the ancient fear that reigns over the city pushing the figures in front of it, that passes in him like the past of his fear, the fear he does not feel, were enough to make him even more fragile, well beyond the consciousness of fragility in which he always holds himself back, but, even though the sentence, in interrupting itself gives him only the interruption of a sentence that does not end, even so, fragile patience, in the horizon of the fear that beseiges it, testifies only to a resort to fragility, even there where it makes thought mad in making it fragile, thoughtless.”
― Maurice Blanchot

“There is a striking correlation between the levels of fragility and levels of displacement. Fragile states are those that have no defence against mass violence. They are not invariably beset by mass violence: but each state is a house of cards.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“A core tenet of CSJ is that emotional harm is comparable to physical harm; when you cause someone to feel a negative emotion, you are causing harm to that individual. Any level of discomfort is considered harmful and, in some cases, the equivalent of violence.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“The Amazon, in all its enigmatic grandeur, embodies the paradoxes of existence. It is a place of untamed beauty and unfathomable complexity, where the fragility and resilience of life intertwine.
It is a testament to the boundless wonders of the natural world, a reminder of our interconnectedness with all living beings. Here in the heart of the Amazon, secrets whisper through the rustling leaves, beckoning the curious and the intrepid.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Days

“The Amazon, in all its enigmatic grandeur, embodies the paradoxes of existence. It is a place of untamed beauty and unfathomable complexity, where the fragility and resilience of life intertwine.
It is a testament to the boundless wonders of the natural world, a reminder of our interconnectedness with all living beings.”
― Ryan Gelpke, Peruvian Days

“Adult fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of age-based stress can become intolerable and trigger a range of emotional and behavioral reactions intended to restore a sense of age-based comfort.”
― Adam F.C. Fletcher, Democracy Deficit Disorder: Learning Democracy with Young People

“Red trillium, clintonia, trout lily and bellwort— the artist explained that these fragile groupings, some upwards of one hundred years old, had a greater capacity for reproduction and survival than single specimens.”
― Kyo Maclear, Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets

“The girl in the mirror is crying.
She looks shaken - lost.
The girl in the mirror is crying.
'I can't find myself,' she says to me.
The girl in the mirror is crying.
'I can't help you,' I reply back.”
― Vanessa de Largie, Don't Hit Me!

“At any moment the mundane might turn lethal.”
― Melanie Finn, The Gloaming

“She said, “It seems so formidable, so solid, so enduring.”
“What does?”
“Civilization. But it’s as fragile as glass.” She glanced at him. “I better shut up. You’re starting to think I’m a nut case.”
“No,” Tim said. “Glass makes sense to me. Glass makes perfect sense.”
― Dean Koontz, The Good Guy

“Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best, she thought. Hatred stupidity devotion greed the four horsemen of the new apocalypse. Yet she loved these wrecked people and wanted to save them from the dark jinn who fed, watered and made manifest the darkness within themselves. To love one human being was to begin to love them all. To love two was to be hooked forever, helpless in the grip of love.”
― Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

“Love is a paradox, finding strength in its vulnerability and resilience in its fragility.”
― Aloo Denish Obiero

“Youth brought invulnerability, immortality, the unshakeable conviction that for you, things would be different, the laws of physics would cut you a break. The missiles would never hit...Maybe for other people...But not for you. And when youth was lucky enough to survive its optimism, all Miller had left was a little fear, a little envy, and the overwhelming sense of life's fragility.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“Even a thousand acts of kindness can be undone by a single unintentional harm, revealing the fragility of trust in human relationships, and the harsh truth stares into one's eyes that humans are often so self-centered and selfish that reliability and reciprocity seems an illusion in this world.”
― Renuka Goria

“... the fragility of the components is required to ensure the solidity of the system. If humans were immortals, they would go extinct from an accident, or from a gradual buildup of misfitness. But shorter shelf life for humans allows genetic changes to accompany the variability in the environment.”
― Nasim Nicholas Taleb