Fragile Balance Quotes

Civilization is hideously fragile … there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.

A light breath fans the flame, a violent gust extinguishes it.

Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem.

Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

The world is indeed only a small tide pool; disturb one part and the rest is threatened.

The affairs of war, like the destiny of battles, as well as empires, hang upon a spiders thread.

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

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.

I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving.

On this thin, scarcely real and yet so perceptible sensation the whole world hung as on a faintly trembling axis, and this in turn rested on the two people in the room.

The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man.

Nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

I'm constantly walking on eggshells because I'm wearing a $10k outfit.

The sanity of society is a balance of a thousand insanity's.

Ecstasy and vulnerability belonged in the same dish. The fear the cup would be snatched away was what gave the wine its savor.

You are only as invincible as your smallest weakness, and those are tiny indeed - the length of a sleeping baby's eyelash, the span of a child's hand. Life turns on a dime, and - it turns out - so does one's conscience.

There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your actions; you learn too late what choices ruin the fragile balance.

It doesn't take much to be at the top or the bottom in a position such as mine.

How thin is the crust of order over the fires of human appetite and the lust for naked power.

The rhythm of life is intricate but orderly, tenacious but fragile. To keep that in mind is to build the key to survival.

[...] a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun [...] rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass. And the people: giant pathworks of colour with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.

The chain that's fixed to the throne of Jove, On which the fabric of our world depends, One link dissolved, the whole creation ends.