Gustave Flaubert Quotes

If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

I bruise like a grape.

You can't escape this feeling of disintegration. The world is fragile. But you also can't let it ruin your life. I'm actually a pretty composed person. I guess people imagine I spend my life thinking about crazy, sinister things but I don't, really. It's not like I'm trying to exorcise any demons.

Metallica is a very complicated, fragile thing. On the outside, it's all metal, but on the inside it's very delicate.

Love is the strongest and most fragile thing we have in life.

I do have a delicate side.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

I'm terrified of the ocean. I think it's beautiful and magical, but I never go in. That deep, dark water, with no understanding of what goes on behind it - I think that's a metaphor for a lot of things.

Life and death are balanced as it were on the edge of a razor

This world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.

The blankets had fallen off and I stared down at her white back, the shoulder blades sticking out as if they wanted to grow into wings, poke through that skin. Little blades. She was helpless.

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight. It is the grass of the field, most frail of all things, that supports all life all the time. But for the green grass, no empire would rise, no man would eat bread: for grain is grass; and Hercules or Napoleon or Henry Ford would alike be denied existence.

Caught between glass and wood, that which breaks and that which bends, that which sings and that which survive. So our lives go.

Life is a toy made of glass; it appears to be of inestimable price, but in reality it is very cheap.

Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open and let in the light and you kill it.

He held me against him gently, as if I was glass - as if I could shatter and fall away from him at any moment and leave him breathless and alone once more.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge.

My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging in slow motion.

With everything so perfect, reality seemed somehow fragile, as if the slightest interruption could imperil her pretty future... all of it felt as tenuous as a soap bubble, shivering and empty.

Life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

I already, and for weeks afterward, felt my nature the coarser for this part of my woodland experience, and was reminded that ourlife should be lived as tenderly and daintily as one would pluck a flower.

She looks like a china doll, observed Grandfather as we departed. I will break just as easily, I muttered.