Brittle Quotes - page 2

I realized I had, unbeknownst to me, signed an invisible contract which required me to enter into a strange new echelon of society. People suddenly wanted to take pictures of me on the street. Journalists were interested in the kind of socks I preferred. ... It was an atmosphere from which I instantly wanted to retreat. I detested the superficial elevation and commodification of it all, juxtaposed with the grotesque self-involvement it would sometimes draw out in me. Being a faceless member of a mob, I soon realized, is far more comforting than teetering on a brittle pedestal one inch off the ground. The exclusion and subtle differentiation that comes with even the rather diluted form of celebrity that I have embarrasses me. (Jack Gleeson)
Long marriages have ended in ruin over tiny and insignificant grievances that were never properly aired and instead grew into a brittle barnacle of hatred. View quote
Augusten Burroughs
Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm. View quote
Oliver Burkeman
I am convinced that a good building must be capable of absorbing the traces of human life and taking on a specific richness... I think of the patina of age on materials, of innumerable small scratches on surfaces, of varnish that has grown dull and brittle, and of edges polished by use. View quote
Peter Zumthor
Brittle masculinity, in the right setting, becomes political atrocity. Strength brings problems; weakness brings others, but weakness posing as strength is the most dangerous of all. View quote
Timothy D. Snyder
Greig, currently hot in the TV comedy Green Wing, has a dark, brittle glamour that isn't quite beauty (there's a disconcerting touch of Edwina Currie about her) and suggests an incipient unhappiness lurking beneath the ready wit. View quote
Tamsin Greig
6472. Nothing more smooth than Glass, yet nothing more brittle; Nothing more fine than Wit, yet nothing more fickle. View quote
Thomas Fuller (writer)
My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless... I'm not going to have a happy ending. View quote
Marya Hornbacher
Saddam spent 35 years stealing and wasting money, and all of these systems are very fragile and brittle, and you try to fix one thing and something else gets in trouble. View quote
Paul Bremer
And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
Hayek possessed a towering intellect. At the same time, his intelligence was as much brittle as it was powerful. (Alan O. Ebenstein)
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk. View quote
Hermann Hesse
The busy chatter of the heat Shrilled like a parakeet; And shuddering at the noonday light The dust lay dead and whiteAs powder on a mummy's face, Or fawned with simian grace Round booths with many a hard bright toy And wooden brittle joy:The cap and bells of Time the Clown That, jangling, whistled down Young cherubs hidden in the guise Of every bird that flies;And star-bright masks for youth to wear, Lest any dream that fare - Bright pilgrim - past our ken, should see Hints of Reality. View quote
Edith Sitwell
The trees creak with their arthritic arms / brittle in their powederd bark / this year took ten years to / tell me that I'm alone again. View quote
Blake Schwarzenbach
No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle. View quote
Alan Watts
The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. View quote
David Mitchell (author)
It is my job, as a writer, to give the world toffee and peanut brittle and tough steak and celery. View quote
Caitlín R. Kiernan
It was like being quite alone on the roof of the world. I felt that if I were to go to the edge and look over ... I would see below all that I had ever known; all the crowded cities and seas covered with ships, and the clamor of harbors and traffic of rivers, and farmlands being worked, and herds of cattle driven in dust across interminable plains. All the clamor and clatter, confusion of voices, tumults, and conflicts, must still be going on, down there-over the edge, and below-but here there was only the sky, and a stillness made audible by the brittle grass. Emptiness was so perfect all around me that I felt a part of it, empty myself. View quote
Rose Wilder Lane
The fragile teacups, the brittle relics, the frail upholstery and shattery glass: this was a world of little things and little ways, their delicacy presupposing their protection. View quote
Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement. View quote
Jerry Spinelli
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. (Robinson Jeffers)
I hate my verses, every line, every word. Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky. Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things. View quote
Robinson Jeffers
Maybe it was a music box. Scott shouldn't have felt depressed. The gadgetry would have given Einstein a headache and driven Steinmetz raving mad. The trouble was, of course, that the box had not yet completely entered the space-time continuum where Scott existed and therefore it could not be opened. At any rate, not till Scott used a convenient rock to hammer the helical nonhelix into a more convenient position. He hammered it, in fact, from its contact point with the fourth dimension, releasing the space-time torsion it had been maintaining. There was a brittle snap. the box jarred slightly, and lay motionless, no longer only partially in existence. Scott opened it easily now. View quote
Lewis Padgett
There are essential and inessential insanities. The latter are solar in character, the former are linked to the moon. Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety - garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively senses are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as coo-coo. Inessential insanities get one in trouble with one's self. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential. Poetry, the best of it, is lunar and is concerned with the essential insanities. Journalism is solar... and is devoted to the inessential. View quote
Tom Robbins
Precious and fragile things Need special handling. My God, what have we done to you? We always tried to share The tenderest of care, Now look what we have put you through.Things get damaged, things get broken. I thought we'd manage. But words left unspoken left us so brittle, There was so little left to give. View quote
Depeche Mode