Quotes & Sayings About Fault Lines

Globalization is exposing new fault lines - between urban and rural communities, for example. — Ban Ki-moon

To me, love is a pure idea forged in flesh, awkwardly maybe, but it had to connect to somewhere, despite twists and turns of underground cable. An all-too-perfect thing. Sometimes the lines get crossed. Or you get a wrong number. But that's nobody's fault. It'll always be like that, so long as we exist in this physical form. As a matter of principle. — Haruki Murakami

This is ... an attempt to find some of the important fault lines in the narrative of "recorded history"
the points where people with access to the technology decided that *this* was how recordings should sound, and *this* is what it means to make a record. Ultimately, this is the story of what it means to make a recording of music
a *representation* of music
and declare it to be music itself. — Greg Milner

Fault lines run along color lines in American public life, and the women's movement is no exception. Over the years, feminism has become more inclusive but there is still hard work to be done to include LGBT women and communities of color. — Christine Pelosi

There's an unexpectedly high share of workers still in agriculture, .. That's like a fault line. — Edward Taylor

People say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They say that when you been through something terrible ... But it doesn't. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape. Creaking along the fault lines, Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you. — Fiona Barton

At school, he enacted a major piece of treachery against his parents. His right hand was Evil Dad, and his left was Righteous Mom. Evil Dad blustered and theorized and dished out pompous bullshit. Righteous Mom complained and accused. In Righteous Mom's cosmology, Evil Dad was the sole source of hemmoroids, kleptomania, global conflict, bad breath, tectonic-plate fault lines, and clogged drains, as well as every migraine headache and menstrual cramp Righteous Mom had ever suffered. — Margaret Atwood

America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me. — Rick Perlstein

Our goal should be to make decision makers internalize the full consequences of their decisions, rather than prevent them from making decisions altogether [...] But we tend to reform under the delusion that the regulated institutions and the markets they operate in are static and passive, and that the regulatory environment will not vary with the cycle. Ironically, faith in draconian regulation is strongest at the bottom of the cycle, when there is little need for participants to be regulated. By contrast, the misconception that markets will govern themselves is most widespread at the top of the cycle, at the point of maximum danger to the system. We need to acknowledge these differences and enact cycle-proof regulation, for a regulation set against the cycle will not stand. To have a better chance of creating stability throughout the cycle--of being cycle-proof--new regulations should be comprehensive, nondiscretionary, contingent, and cost-effective. — Raghuram G. Rajan

I was eighteen when I got lost in Houston, and in him I found myself. They say love is just two souls recognizing each other. With Houston and me it was more like two souls staring into a mirror, my left hand aligned with his right, our hearts skipping a beat at the same moment, our lungs choking on the same noxious air, our scars as perfectly aligned as mountains and fault lines. If ever two souls were perfectly right and perfectly wrong for each other, it would be us. — Cassia Leo

How will you use the years God gives you? Will you be remembered for being a fault-finder? Or will you be known for your quick smile, the laugh lines around your eyes, and the twinkle deep within? After all, God gives you your face, but you provide the expression! — Barbara Johnson

Did I, my lines intend for public view,
How many censures, would their faults pursue,
Some would, because such words they do affect,
Cry they're insipid, empty, uncorrect.
And many, have attained, dull and untaught,
The name of wit, only by finding fault.
True judges, might condemn their want of wit,
And all might say, they're by a woman writ. — Anne Finch

But in truth, the world is constantly shifting: shape and size, location in space. It's got edges and chasms, too many to count. They open up, close, reappear somewhere else. Geologists nay have mapped out the planet's tectonic plates -hidden shelves of rock that grind, one against the other, forming mountains, creating continents - but thy can't plot the fault lines that run through our heads, divide out hearts.
The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole — Anderson Cooper

Accident - A statistical inevitability. Some nuclear power plants are built on fault lines, but ever mine, dam, oil rig, and waste dump is founded upon a tacit acceptance of the worst-case scenario. One a long enough timeline, everything that can go wrong will, however small the likelihood is from one day to the next. The responsible parties may wring their hands about the Fukushima meltdown - and the Gult of Mexico oil spill, and the Exxon Valdez, and Hurricane Katrina, and Chernobyl, and Haiti - but accident is no accident. — CrimethInc.

I learned by heart the lines of your face. I can draw them blindly on a water canvas.
Your face in the middle of an inflamed argument. Your face in the middle of a mild one-- when you're at fault.
Your face filled with rainbows of laughter. Your face filled with clouds of distress.
Your face, fluttering, when I open you the door. Your face, agonizing, every time I stand waiting, for the elevator.
Your face, eager, when you kiss me. Your face, surprised, when I lead you to bed.
Your face in the middle of pain. Your face on the outskirts of pleasure.
Your face, with a baffled look, when you wake up. Your face falling asleep, with total surrender.
Your face the first night we met. Your face the last night we parted.
I learned by heart the lines of your face. They all led me into hell.
They all led me into heaven. — Malak El Halabi

I wore you on me at all times
Like I now carry my pen.
Unlike your own opinion my
Belongings must have a function.
You bled through the ink of my lines and
To be my subject nursed your thirst.

Was it my fault, or your own, that you forgot
- I do not deal in tender verse. — Mie Hansson

Shakespeare never had more than 6 lines together without a fault. — Samuel Johnson

Shakespeare never has six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion. — Samuel Johnson

As the survivors returned to Confederate lines, Lee met them and sobbed, "It's all my fault this time."158 It was.159 — Edward H. Bonekemper III

Just ask any subjugated thing-
a wife, population, race,
deferred dream and
resource misappropriated,
or continental plate;
and it will tell you stories
of inevitable fault lines
of not-quite-stray bullets
and strike slip boundaries,
places where intensity builds
and lets off small or great sparks, — Marie Anzalone

Many people are more like the earth than we know. Maybe they have fault lines that sooner or later are going to split open under pressure. — Rebecca Wells

The fault lines are shifting from the boundaries of nations into the web of our societies and the streets of our cities. And, terrorism and extremism are a global force that are larger than their changing names, groups, territories and targets. — Narendra Modi

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do. — Terry Eagleton

He chiseled open the fault lines in the others' personalities. — David Mitchell

A prophet's task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone. — Kathleen Norris

Until this moment, I had not realized that someone could break your heart twice, along the very same fault lines. — Jodi Picoult

Monsters serve both to mark the fault-lines but also, subversively, to signal the fragility of such boundaries. — Elaine Graham

It had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered
what matters so often in the course of everyday human life
were the surfaces and the joins. — Michael Chabon

The heart breaks in so many different ways that when it heals, it will have fault lines ... — John Geddes

I also think the party needs to work on a couple different fronts. There are so many fault lines within the party: conservative vs. moderate, the more fiscally minded Republicans vs. the more socially minded Republicans, the Old Guard - the sort of Newt Gingrich-Karl Rove Republican - vs. the New Guard - the Michael Steele-Sarah Palin sort of emerging sect of the party. And the party has to decide what direction it's going to go in. — Andrea Tantaros

If love disappeared when we touched the fault-lines, it wouldn't be worth much, would it? — Claire Cross

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion. — Robert Galbraith

They tied me back together, but they didn't use double knots. My insides are draining out of the fault lines in my skin, I can feel it, but every time I check the bandages, they're dry. — Laurie Halse Anderson

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude. — Peter L. Berger

It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation-states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. — Samuel P. Huntington

I think how there are fault lines in men as old and uncharted as the earth itself. Made known just before the ground starts separating and by then it's too late. — Ashley Warlick

It's a fault line where the flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of urban America crashing in from the other direction. — Antoine Predock

All humanity inspires me. Every passer-by is my unconscious sitter; and as strange as it may seem, I really draw folk as I see them. Surely it is not my fault that they fall into certain lines and angles. — Aubrey Beardsley

I've traveled this road for many decades and I still don't know how to go. I am a wanderer, traversing mountains of time. There is no fault, only fault lines that tremor and quake, barring me, no warning. Aftershocks. -Broken Places — Rachel Thompson

I come from a long line of women who like shoes to a fault. — Zoe Lister-Jones

There is a defect in us
as human beings
because we think ourselves
a fortress, a mountain, unbreakable
but at the center
in that stillness of being
there is a chasm
of love
which echoes hope, compassion, empathy
try again, it says
and though the fault lines are full of darkness
we are held together by
the optimism and foolishness
of a single spark — Nadia Hasan

Societies held together by fear and repression may offer the illusion of stability for a time, but they are built upon fault lines that will eventually tear asunder. — Barack Obama

Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations ... . This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures ... . It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures. — Christian Smith

Charity is one of those remarkable words that helps to identify the fault lines of a culture. — Janet Poppendieck

Margo says, I know what she's talking about. The something deeper and more secret. It's like cracks inside of you. Like there are these fault lines where things don't meet up right. — John Green

She had other favourite lines. Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn't like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, 'It's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.' That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear.
She liked that phrase and it was more than once used towards me; when some well-wisher asked how I was, Mrs W looked down and sighed, 'She's a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.'
This was even worse for me than it had been for the gas oven. I was particularly worried about the 'dead' part, and wondered which buried and unfortunate relative I had so offended. — Jeanette Winterson

Continental Drift

you have moved through
like an ice flow-
steady slow substantial

tumble of glacial tongue
sweeping through
valleys reshaped

you arrived on your own epic time
patient and thorough
meltwater firn crevasse and all

lifting rocks on shifting plates
smoothing edges
and moving the very axes of my teeth

you soothed over rifts and fault lines
leaving me
newly minted

peaked and ridged
steep and crested
sloped and spurred

Hillsides lush
and summits glistening
I rush to a new dawn

but not without raw traces
of your tender era
scratched warmly on my every acre — Nancy Boutilier

Politicians today vow, "Never again!" But they will naturally focus only on dealing with a few scapegoats, not just because the system is harder to change, but also because if politicians traced the fault lines, they would find a few running through themselves. — Raghuram G. Rajan

How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilizations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain's festering,
blood-drenched gifts to the modem world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conicts of today. — Arundhati Roy

God clues us in to the fact that, "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." In short, God is not logical. This is not to say that he is illogical, only that he is not limited by logic. Simplified, "logic" is connecting the dots. We identify the dots we consider relevant, then connect them into lines and patterns. God, on the other hand, may see that, beneath one of the dots is a stack of a trillion more dots, each of which may be combined with the others. Little wonder that our ways and meanings frequently fail to match God's ways and meanings. Great wonder that, when they don't, we tend to fault him. — Ron Brackin

There are too many fault lines to count now. — Nicholas Sparks

Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it "good as new." But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to "good as new" and instead employ a "better than new" aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl's unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself. — Teresita Fernandez