Quotes About Brittle

#1. Toward the end of his life, [Arnold] Toynby said the Christianity he saw developing was brittle, imperialistic and incapable of reforming itself.

John Shelby Spong

#2. black-cloaked monsters chased after me. I shoved helplessly through the brittle pine trees, leafless branches clawing at my flesh. Snow flooded my sneakers, soaking higher and higher on my jeans with every step I took.

Jessica Sorensen

#3. The brittle bones beneath my chest cracked, piercing my heart. It was you who breathed new life into my lungs and it was you who would later syphon the life you had given so as to feed your selfish desires

Sonya Watson

#4. Varyk's deadly gaze turned brittle. 'You really don't want to take that tone with me.' Dev crossed his arms over his chest. 'Well, I do have several others we can choose from. Contemptuous. Angry. Snide. Aggravated. How about I just settle on extreme sarcasm and we call it even?

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#5. Deep in the drilled-in mud of the fields behind me, our bulbs are wrapped in their brittle skins with their messages of color stored inside. Blue iris, yellow crocus, tulips of all colors.

Anna Smaill

#6. Raw anguish slithers through my brittle bones as the deathly call rots the air. Who murdered you old friend? The forest has no words to identify the hand, only erratic echo.

H.S. Crow

#7. Their smiles were cracking. Glass is brittle.

Robert Bloch

#8. Then there was silence, the air like ice. Brittle-looking birch trees with black marks on their white bark, and some kind of small untidy evergreens rolled up like sleepy bears. The frozen lake not level but mounded along the shore, as if the waves had turned to ice in the act of falling.

Alice Munro

#9. One of the great virtues of Confucianism was its suppleness. Western political thought tended to be rather brittle; as soon as the state became corrupt, everything ceased to make sense. Confucianism always retained its equilibrium, like a cork that could float as well in spring water or raw sewage.

Neal Stephenson

#10. The Internet is brittle and fragile and too easy to take down. It's a conduit for criminal activity. We need international treaties to prosecute the bad guys, but we don't have them.

Vint Cerf

#11. It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.

Jostein Gaarder

#12. Ronan and Declan Lynch were undeniably brothers, with the same dark brown hair and sharp nose, but Declan was solid where Ronan was brittle. Declan's wide jaw and smile said Vote for me while Ronan's buzzed head and thin mouth warned that this species was dangerous.

Maggie Stiefvater

#13. Revealing her secret to her friends had lightened her burden. She found herself better able to focus, and her mind became a dry sponge soaking up knowledge. Lieutenant Volf may have been a brittle

M.A. Larson

#14. To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous

Yukio Mishima

#15. I have become one of those brittle, busy people who emerge from suffering like a tornado, turning so fast that we do not even realize how much self-destruction we're causing. The

Jodi Picoult

#16. We would make our heroes shallow ... We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength.

Anne Rice

#17. Maybe she'd been drinking too much of the super-sweet Mexican Coca-Cola they had down here. Or maybe she was just tired, alone, and far from home. Because somewhere in the brittle, concrete center of Azrael's dark heart, something was melting.

Melissa De La Cruz

#18. Howidoono?" Dee tries to ask, but there's a mound of Brown Butter Almond Brittle ice cream on her tongue. "How did you know I needed this?" He gives her an "oh please" look. "I have a sister and a girl best friend. This is not amateur hour.

Emery Lord

#19. No matter how far back Ned searched in the brittle yellowed pages, always he found the gold yielding before the coal.

George R R Martin

#20. Believe me, there's nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means. Then watch how it turns to dust.

Alexander McCall Smith

#21. Echoing off the tile walls, the sizzle-splash of the falling water sounded like the hissing of serpents and the brittle laughter of strange children.

Dean Koontz

#22. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#23. One spring patio is for rodeos
niggled with iodine figures, weaved
tapestries inside vast Tuileries.
But that reminds me, how exactly
do words form brittle histories

Adam Fitzgerald

#24. The first and the most important thing is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms, countless in number, are transient and brittle. The life everlasting is independent of any form but manifests itself in all forms. Life then does not die ... but the forms are dissolved.

Sri Aurobindo

#25. Of all forms of government and society, those of free men and women are in many respects the most brittle. They give the fullest freedom for activities of private persons and groups who often identify their own interests, essentially selfish, with the general welfare.

Dorothy Thompson

#26. Strength ebbed and flowed, but brittle would break.

Shelley Noble

#27. The loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable - that one false step involves in her endless ruin - that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful - and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the opposite sex.

Jane Austen

#28. 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.

Robinson Jeffers

#29. Him.You are good, O God, and You are faithful. Tenderize and soften our Lenten hearts, we pray, lest they grow brittle and break.

Jan Karon

#30. I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.

Tom Stoppard

#31. That loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable-- that one false step involves her in endless ruin-- that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful-- and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the opposite sex." ~Mary Bennett, P&P

Jane Austen

#32. The brittle is easy to shatter.

Laozi

#33. Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.

David Quammen

#34. Unbendingness can also be monomania, it can ca be tyranny, and also it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last.

Salmon Rushdie

#35. The traces of our life here will lie cold and still, dreaming, like the brittle eyes of dolls in an abandoned cabin, and the last men will look to them for explanations, or apologies.

Tim Cahill

#36. 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.

Jerry Spinelli

#37. The living are soft and yielding; the dead are rigid and stiff. Living plants are flexible and tender; the dead are brittle and dry.

Laozi

#38. Epochs later, the curtains grew dusty and brittle, the deep, vicious colour of a bruise. The floorboards creaked and we were civilized. We were no longer the wild, ravening voices of the world, howling our shame and indignation at the sky.

Brenna Yovanoff

#39. The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#40. We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In

Yuval Noah Harari

#41. When Alaska Young is sitting with her legs crossed in a brittle, periodically green clover patch leaning forward in search of four-leaf clovers, the pale skin of her sizable cleavage clearly visible, it is a plain fact of human physiology that it becomes impossible to join in her clover search.

John Green

#42. Oh you, my generation!- we were a lovely lot! Sharp minds- arguing all the time and brittle bodies and even more brittle laughter- and all the time knowing that we were growing up to die.

Joan Wehlen Morrison

#43. God, this life is a cold, brittle thing. And yet it's all there is.

Jess Walter

#44. Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America's brittle and mutating id.

John Burdett

#45. I just get excited doing shows. Off stage I am actually very feeble and must be spoon-fed because my hands are too brittle.

Dane Cook

#46. From behind the Iron Curtain, there are signs that tyranny is in trouble and reminders that its structure is as brittle as its surface is hard.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#47. The pages were yellowed and had gone to brown at the edges. They were brittle, much like the memories the photos evoked.

Michael Connelly

#48. Out of the window , I could see a tree in the distance -little more than a sapling, really, stunted and fragile, it's slender, brittle branches burdened by a precarious layer of snow. It was not healthy; I only had to look at it to understand that.

Gary William Murning

#49. And all the while the burning lime Eats flesh and bone away, It eats the brittle bone by night, And the soft flesh by day, It eats the flesh and bone by turns, But it eats the heart alway.

Oscar Wilde

#50. We were broken, brittle and fragile. The question was, were we still precious to each other? Or, instead of everything falling into place, had it fallen into pieces?

Megan Hart

#51. I forced a smile. It was the one I'd been practicing all morning. It felt tight at the edges and brittle everywhere in between.

Becca Fitzpatrick

#52. There are some young almond tress, which ordinarily look as if drawn by a childish hand. Now, as the wind sets their weak branches gibbering, they seem like shamanistic scratches on the white bone of the brittle bright night.

John Collier

#53. Tomorrow will come and today will pass, / But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.

Phyllis McGinley

#54. I knew what she was, and it made no difference at all. She was hard, as ruthless as she was beautiful, as brittle as bone china.

Clifton Adams

#55. Even in our best shape we are a brittle piece of mortality. Your life is a breath, don't waste it.

LeCrae

#56. 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.

Paul Bremer

#57. In Christ, we are free to act, to do what we need to do, what we should do. The world understands this freedom, the freedom to act; but if freedom is reduced to actions willed by each of us, the world becomes a brittle place. Each one's freedom is limited by the action of others.

Francis George

#58. Sometimes I grow
so tired of speaking
my emotions to you.

I open my mouth
and dust spills out
instead of feelings.

Dust, and the yellow
wings of moths,
and brittle paper,

scrawled over
with riddles that
lack solutions.

Gabriel Gadfly

#59. The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#60. Men are brittle, I reckon. They don't bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.

Joe Abercrombie

#61. 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.

Peter Zumthor

#62. But God brings the rebirth. He restores what can't be restored. He takes what is brittle and broken and beyond all hope, and infuses His own life into dead spaces. Not just once, but again and again. Ever renewing. Ever revitalizing.

Matt Chandler

#63. The sand should be neither coarse nor fine but of a middling quality or about the size of the common pop(p)y seed. If the sand is too coarse the mortar will be short or brittle ... If the sand is too fine the cement will shrink and crack after it has been used.

Canvass White

#64. A film closed over the past as she spoke, a barrier as brittle and fragile as ice forming. It would grow and strengthen. It would become impenetrable, opaque.

Kim Edwards

#65. Meditation ... dissolves the mind. It erases itself. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass.

Tom Robbins

#66. The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability as opposed to resilience and hard work, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.

Joshua Waitzkin

#67. Civilization ... is another word for respect for life. One can't have too much respect for a loveliness that's brittle as spun glass.

Elizabeth Goudge

#68. It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry.

Marisha Pessl

#69. Grace is the ability to accept change. Be open and supple; the brittle break.

Ethan Hawke

#70. Alec laughed, a short, brittle laugh. The day I'm wise is the day you're careful.

Cassandra Clare

#71. She gave a brittle smile. "The curriculum can be challenging, but I have no doubt that Sophie will do very well."
Never had encouragement sounded so much like a threat.

Rachel Hawkins

#72. It's an urban November P.M.: very last leaves down, dry gray hairy grass, brittle bushes, gap-toothed trees. The rising moon looks like it doesn't feel very well.

David Foster Wallace

#73. You make yourself too hard, you make yourself brittle too. Crack once, crack all to pieces.

Joe Abercrombie

#74. You're wild now, too. And brave. What else do you want to be?"
"I want to be with you."
The words slipped out before I could stop them and I heard him suck in a sharp breath.
The brittle silence told me I'd done something I couldn't ever undo. I'd changed everything.

Molly O'Keefe

#75. Pale and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food; hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet of brittle glass
an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India.

Charles Dickens

#76. I developed osteoporosis of the personality. My thought processes became brittle.

Mac O'Grady

#77. Faith comes in different tempers: there's the hard, brittle faith that shatters when it meets an obstacle it can't cut through, and the tough, springy faith that bounces off unchipped.

K.J. Parker

#78. I am going to shrink and shrink until I am a dry fall leaf, complete with a translucent spine and brittle veins, blowing away in a stiff wind, up, up, up into a crisp blue sky.

Julie Gregory

#79. Therefore, when we neglect to fear such a brittle monstrosity, we render it powerless.

Chuck Palahniuk

#80. There's something brittle in me that will break before it bends.

Mark Lawrence

#81. Once, when I was young and true. Someone left me sad - Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.

Dorothy Parker

#82. It is true that success is the most boring thing, it is tinny and brittle, failure runs deeper. Success is dangerous. I have a very complicated relationship with that word.

Arundhati Roy

#83. Logic in all its infinite potential, is the most dangerous of vices. For one can always find some form of logic to justify his action, and rest comfortably in the assurance, that what he did abides by reason. That is why, for us brittle beings, Intention is the only true weapon of peace.

Ilyas Kassam

#84. They talked about fishing, food, winds and stonework; about growing tomatoes, keeping poultry and roasting lamb, catching crayfish and scallops; telling tales, jokes; the meaning of their stories nothing, the drift of them everything; the brittle and beautiful dream itself.

Richard Flanagan

#85. On the inside I would still be little Lark, brittle bones and sharp feelings, certain that I would never be able to fulfill the duties before me.

Amy Harmon

#86. No matter how healthy, intelligent or affluent we may be, if our minds are weak, then our happiness will also be frail and brittle. Our minds of faith, moreover, enable us to bring out the full potential in all things and situations, so it is crucial that we strive to forge our minds of faith.

Daisaku Ikeda

#87. That beast inside you, the one you think is tethered tightly to the post, the one you've tamed with art, love, prayer, meditation: it's barely muzzled. The knot is weak. The post is brittle. All it takes is two words and a siren to cut it loose.

Adrian J. Walker

#88. Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.

Anne Enright

#89. Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.

Anthony Powell

#90. I'd rather have peanut brittle crumbs on my face than flies in my eyes, Havermeyer retorted.

Joseph Heller

#91. This earthly existence of ours is more brittle that the glass bangles that ladies wear.

Mahatma Gandhi

#92. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that you used to shatter easily. But
now you've become less brittle.

Sherry Thomas

#93. I am startled by how resistant people are to doing anything nice or nurturing for themselves, especially women. They fear being selfish. This intense clinging to a martyr role doesn't serve anyone. It makes you brittle, not resilient.

Annette Vaillancourt

#94. As we grow up, we are exposed to hate and greed and anger and jealousy and peanut brittle and all kinds of things, our subtly body erodes.

Frederick Lenz

#95. Along the brittle treacherous bright streets
of memory comes my heart,singing like
an idiot,whispering like a drunken man

E. E. Cummings

#96. How the fuck did I get here? I thought. If I was going to be completely sober for the rest of my life, if I couldn't even have one drink at the end of a long and brittle day, then the life I lived needed to be a life from which I did not seek escape.

Augusten Burroughs

#97. A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.

Walker Percy

#98. She smiled at him, that same look of shared understanding, then reached in again to touch his hand, pinching his palm between her thumb and index finger. 'You OK?'

'I could be on fire, but seeing you would make it all OK,' he replied, his voice as brittle as a three-pack-a-day smoker.

Sean Black

#99. Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

Emily Dickinson

#100. Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,
pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case
(what the skull can endure!)

H.D.