Flimsy Quotes & Sayings

Nicole's world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The peace we seek in the world is not the flimsy peace which is merely an interlude between wars, but a peace which can endure for generations to come. It is important that we understand both the necessity and the limitations of America's role in maintaining that peace. Unless we in America work to preserve the peace, there will be no peace. Unless we in America work to preserve freedom, there will be no freedom. — Richard M. Nixon

Every morning she'd crick herself down onto the flimsy rug by her bed and pray, but it was actually a promise: Today I won't yell, I won't cry, I won't clench up into a ball like I am waiting for a blow to level me. I will enjoy today. She might make it to lunch before she went sour. — Gillian Flynn

Popularity is more than looks. It's not clothes, hair, or even possessions. When we let go of these labels, we see how flimsy and relative they actually are. Real popularity is kindness and acceptance. It is about who you are, and how you treat others. — Maya Van Wagenen

In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under "rational" scrutiny. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft, flimsy silk. — Willa Cather

Are you still wearing those flimsy white panties?"

"Yes," Story breathed.

"Good. I need you to reach inside and pet your clit for me. Gently, like I do it. — Tessa Bailey

There was no reason to leave. So I put my brain elsewhere and when it got dark I realized that all the bars and cafes were full of people who had been becoming more and more exuberant and loud and drunk, and I looked through a window into one and there were people dancing against each other and smiling and drinking and they were all wearing Santa hats: women wearing Santa hats, old men in Santa hats, flimsy-legged boys with thick dreadlocks wearing Santa hats, and why did they want to impersonate someone who only gives and disappears? — Catherine Lacey

How flimsy our existence is, how many conditions must exist and must continue to exist over the course of millions of years so that a single flower or a single pencil or a single book might exist ... For a moment I felt like a string being strummed by thousands of fingers, and I closed my eyes. Our existence on this planet hangs by a thread, every tomato and every onion is such an enormous miracle you could collapse with awe in a vegetable market. — Dror Burstein

Relationships weren't ocean liners with stabilizers. They were flimsy affairs. No, they were more dangerous than canoes. They were kayaks, two-seaters that overturned with every careless comment, each intimation of indifference. You spend half the time upside down, under water. It takes a lot of skill to get right-side up before the relationship drowns. — Wayne Clark

As the wind ripped through the flimsy protection offered by my hoodie, I began to realize the fairly hopeless situation I had gotten myself into and began to pray that either the storm would pass over or that some kind person would come to my rescue.
Apparently, Alex wasn't the only one avoiding my calls. Or maybe God just didn't feel the need to answer the prayers of complete morons. — Tammy Blackwell

The body image took a real battering. I had really not taken on board how I would feel dressed in a flimsy dress in front of millions of people. — Lynda Bellingham

The trouble with being a secular humanist is that we don't have a congregation. We don't meet so it's a very flimsy tribe, but there's a wonderful quotation from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism. Something perfectly is going on. I do not doubt it, but the explanations I hear do not satisfy me. — Kurt Vonnegut

Any programming language is at its best before it is implemented and used. Anything is possible, anything can happen. On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins marvelous patterns. — August Strindberg

When she left, it was like someone had ripped my heart out, crumbled it up like a flimsy piece of loose leaf paper and crammed it back into my chest. It somehow managed to work, but it would never, ever feel the same. — Steph Campbell

The truth that writers secretly harbor is that all books are failures. We try to do something that can't be done. Words. Is that all we rely on? Smudgy ink marks on a page? Pallid wisps and blotches? Text as scaffolding trying to hold up worlds? Actually, no, it's not all we rely on. What's worse is our reliance on the reader. A writer is forever locked in an interdependent relationship. It's like building a bridge from opposite sides of a river - our flimsy words and their frail, overreaching imaginations. The bridge will never meet in the middle. It's not possible. Sometimes you haven't even decided on the same river. The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis missed in the middle by a matter of inches the first time around. They tried again and made it. Writers know we never will. — Julianna Baggott

Obligation is a flimsy base for creativity, way down the list behind passion, courage, instinct, and the desire to do something great. — Twyla Tharp

The only furniture in the dank space was a flimsy cot. Water dripped steadily in one corner. A hole in the floor appeared to serve as a latrine. What most caught Kendra's eye were the messages scratched on the wall. She roamed the cell, reading the crudely inscribed phrases.

"Seth rules!

Welcome to Seth's House.

Seth rocks!

Seth was here. Now it's your turn.

Seth Sorenson forever.

Enjoy the food!

If you're reading this, you can read.

All roads lead to Seth.

Is it still dripping?

Seth haunts these halls.

You're in a Turkish prison!

Seth is the man!

Use the meal mats as toilet paper." And so forth.

Cold, hopeless, and alone, Kendra found herself giggling at the messages her brother had scrawled. He must have been so bored! — Brandon Mull

That cheery, flimsy distraction from Death; or in a pinch Law & Order, because on some station or other, at any time of day or night, you can find it
Detective Benson! Detective Stabler! My long lost!
and no longer be alone. — Claire Messud

Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days? — Alice Munro

Let other complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry; for it lacks passion. Men's thoughts are thin and flimsy like lace, they are themselves pitiable like the lacemakers. The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful. For a worm it might be regarded as a sin to harbor such thoughts, but not for a being made in the image of God. Their lusts are dull and sluggish, their passions sleepy ... This is the reason my soul always turns back to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. I feel that those who speak there are at least human beings: they hate, they love, they murder their enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations, they sin. — Soren Kierkegaard

It almost seemed as if there must be some random and of course unfair thrift in the emotional housekeeping of the world, if the great happiness
however temporary, however flimsy
of one person could come out of the great unhappiness of another. — Alice Munro

I've forgotten more about bad putting than all the lousy putters in the firmament combined. My mind has been twisted into an incurable, disturbing venue of bad speed and inadequate line. I just want to go out and not feel like I'm putting a Rubik's Cube with a flimsy piece of rope. — Gary McCord

A snap of Rhys's fingers, and my nightclothes - and some flimsy underthings - appeared on the bed. "I couldn't decide which scrap of lace I wanted you to wear, so I brought you a few to choose from."
"Pig," I barked — Sarah J. Maas

For a moment I hoped I was in heaven--or wherever it is my kind go when death calls...Instead I opened my eyes and discovered that I was in hospital. The flimsy little gown they'd put me in had tiny pink piggies on it. My first thought was that I had to have been in bad shape to be admitted. My second, I'm ashamed to admit, was whether or not they'd let me take the nightie home with me. — Kate Locke

Words, for all they were flimsy and invisible, had great strength. They could be fortified as a castle wall and sharp as a foil. They could bite, slap, shock, wound. But unlike deeds, words couldn't really help you. No promise ever rescued a person; it was the carrying-through of it that brought about salvation. — Jodi Picoult

Instead of expensive fish eggs and stinky cheeses, Jay had packed Doritos and chicken soft tacos - Violet's favorites. And instead of grapes, he brought Oreos.
He knew her way too well.
Violet grinned as he pulled out two clear plastic cups and a bottle of sparkling cider. She giggled. "What? No champagne?"
He shrugged, pouring a little of the bubbling apple juice into each of the flimsy cups. "I sorta thought that a DUI might ruin the mood." He lifted his cup and clinked - or rather tapped - it against hers. "Cheers." He watched her closely as she took a sip. — Kimberly Derting

It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about. — Stephen King

She'd put the envelope Tibby had left for her unopened in her underwear drawer. At first it was so she would see it there, and then she tried to cover it so she wouldn't see it there, but it turned out her underwear was too flimsy to cover anything. — Ann Brashares

Putting that aside, did he even want another child? At all? ever? She thought he did, but now that she considered it, she saw that her beliefs were based on flimsy evidence, such as the fact that he adored his son, and she'd once seen him smile tenderly at a stranger's baby, and his mother wanted him to have more children and he seemed very fond of his mother. Also, he was a lovely man, and lovely men should automatically want more babies because it was a biological imperative that they pass on the loveliness gene — Liane Moriarty

Jenny retained a flimsy essence of the truth. It was a quiet knowing she'd always hold in her heart...'Broken Mirror by Oliver Rixon — Oliver Rixon

Its more a trance, jonah said. the whole world is pressing in on me, like a weight on my chest, slowly pushing me down ans down. and there's nothing between me and this weight but my flimsy skin. Its not enough. It won't protect me. It doesn't keep anything out. The outside will keep pressing until my ribs are crushed. — Natalie Standiford

Just when you seem to yourself nothing but a flimsy web of questions, you are given the questions of others to hold in the emptiness of your hands, songbird eggs that can still hatch if you keep them warm, butterflies opening and closing themselves in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure their scintillant fur, their dust. You are given the questions of others as if they were answers to all you ask. Yes, perhaps this gift is your answer. — Denise Levertov

And then one student said that happiness is what happens when you go to bed on the hottest night of the summer, a night so hot you can't even wear a tee-shirt and you sleep on top of the sheets instead of under them, although try to sleep is probably more accurate. And then at some point late, late, late at night, say just a bit before dawn, the heat finally breaks and the night turns into cool and when you briefly wake up, you notice that you're almost chilly, and in your groggy, half-consciousness, you reach over and pull the sheet around you and just that flimsy sheet makes it warm enough and you drift back off into a deep sleep. And it's that reaching, that gesture, that reflex we have to pull what's warm - whether it's something or someone - toward us, that feeling we get when we do that, that feeling of being safe in the world and ready for sleep, that's happiness. — Paul Schmidtberger

Habits start out as off-hand remarks, magazine advertisements, friendly hints, experiments - like flimsy cobwebs with little substance. They grow with practice, layer by layer - thought on thought - fused with imagination and emotion until they become like steel cables - unbreakable. Habits are attitudes which grow from cobwebs into cables that control your everyday life. Self-discipline alone can make or break a habit. Self discipline alone can effect a permanent change in your self image and in you. Self-discipline achieves goals. Self discipline is not 'doing without,' it is 'doing within.' — Denis Waitley

Please accept this fan with indulgence. If one of the ghosts that have alighted here after flitting through my memory made you weep long ago, while it was still partaking of life, then recognize that ghost without bitterness and remember that it is a mere shadow and that it will never make you suffer again. I could quite innocently capture these ghosts on the frail paper to which your hand will lend wings, for those ghosts are too unreal and too flimsy to cause any harm ... — Marcel Proust

This bullet can go straight through the couch."
He was right. Fuck Ikea for making such flimsy furniture. — Karina Halle

Whenever Great Britain's iron hand needs to appear, like a well-oiled mechanism that is never forgotten or neglected, the two pillars that hold up the Empire's dominion rise into view: the Administration and the Law. As I have said before . . . nothing odder than the flimsy wood and stone building called the Palace of Justice, in the farthest corner of the South Atlantic, provided so that the authorities might investigate the murder of men, who, romantically . . . went out to exercise their own rights over the life and liberty of others about whom they had not the slightest knowledge. — Sylvia Iparraguirre

Those, therefore, who effect to despise "profane" Science are themselves despicable. It is their own incapacity for true Thought of any serious kind, their vanity and pertness; nay more also! their own subconsciousness sense of their own shame and idleness, that induces them to build these flimsy fortification of pretentious ignorance. — Aleister Crowley

The prisoners were handcuffed together, and it was these hands that caught Martha's attention: the working hands, clasped together by broad and gleaming steel, held carefully at waist level, steady against the natural movement of swinging arms - the tender dark flesh cautious against the bite of the metal. These people were being taken to the magistrate for being caught at night after curfew, or forgetting to carry one of the passes which were obligatory, or - but there were a dozen reasons, each as flimsy. — Doris Lessing

For instance, a man generally doesn't even know how small a woman is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child's and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem. — Russell Banks

Greed is too flimsy
to flawed — Mario

A meringue is really nothing but a foam. And what is a foam after all, but a big collection of bubbles? And what's a bubble? It's basically a very flimsy little latticework of proteins draped with water. We add sugar to this structure, which strengthens it. But things can, and do, go wrong. — Alton Brown

If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us - mounts and riders, both - could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars thumble out. — Angela Carter

I looked down and thought about how I was made of paper. I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else. — John Green

I don't much like being a public figure, because so often how people appear is not how they really are, and I think one of the issues about our society is that we make judgments about people on the basis of very flimsy evidence. — Robert Winston

Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true. — Daniel Kahneman

Hip-hop is about tearing down the system to better it, tearing down the system to better themselves. No matter how flimsy it might seem, they always wanted the finer things in life. — Russell Simmons

When my father saw my bloody elbows and knees, he tried to talk me out of flying. "People aren't cut out for it," he explained. "Our bodies are designed all wrong." I didn't believe him. He was the one who had told me about bumblebees, how their wings were too flimsy to support their fat bodies; yet, in the summer, they were everywhere, buzzing impossibly by. — Jenny Offill

Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know - the present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table - which you, specifically, is the real one? — Garth Risk Hallberg

JAMES HALE sat at a side-street noodle-stall. The stall was set-up underneath the shade of a row of fruit trees. He watched a pair of pigeons courting beneath a fig tree. The male's tail feathers were pushed up in self-promotion and his plumage was arrogantly puffed up. He danced his elaborate dance of love. The female didn't look impressed. She turned her back to him. Birds were like gangster rappers, Hale thought. They sang songs about how tough they were and how many other birds they'd nested. They were egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Posers in a leafy street. The bastards flew at the first sign of danger. They couldn't make it on the ground. Hale hated birds with their merry chirps and their flimsy nests. Tweet. Tweet. Fucking. Tweet. The only thing Hale admired about them was the fact that they could fly. That would be cool. Right now, flying would be good. — James A. Newman

we are highly invested in feeling different from one another - and superior - no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being. You — Leonard Mlodinow

Read History: thus learn how small a space
You may inhabit, nor inhabit long
In crowding Cosmos
in that confined place
Work boldly; build your flimsy barriers strong;
Turn round and round, make warm your nest; among
The other hunting beasts, keep heart and face,
Not to betray the doomed and splendid race
You are so proud of, to which you belong.
For trouble comes to all of us: the rat
Has courage, in adversity, to fight;
But what a shining animal is man,
Who knows, when pain subsides, that is not that,
For worse than that must follow
yet can write
Music; can laugh; play tennis; even plan. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Weight loss is not the key to your dreams. The truth is there is no lock and the door is flimsy. — Golda Poretsky

He's got to do better than the shoddy piecing together of flimsy evidence that contradicts the briefings we have received by various agencies, .. I'm not hearing the same things at the briefings that I'm hearing from the president's top officials. — Russ Feingold

Let us break through some of the inhibitions that have existed to talk together across the flimsy lines of separation of faith, to talk together, to study together, to pray together, and ultimately to sing together His Holy name. — Joe Lieberman

I mean, the ones on trial are not like me in any way: they're a different kind of human being. They live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there's this thick, high wall. At least, that's how I saw it at first ... I became a lot less sure of myself. In other words, I started seeing it like this: that there really was no such thing as a wall separating their world from mine. Or if there was such a wall, it was probably a flimsy one made of papier-mache. The second I leaned on it, I'd probably fall right through and end up on the other side. Or maybe it's that the other side has already managed to sneak its way inside of us, and we just haven't noticed. — Haruki Murakami

She called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy. — John Green

Roles written for women are so much more complex on television. The film world is becoming quite flimsy for women. — Julianna Margulies

He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight. Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.) — Vladimir Nabokov

If it were possible for a metaphysician to be a golfer, he might perhaps occasionally notice that his ball, instead of moving forward in a vertical plane (like the generality of projectiles, such as brickbats and cricket balls), skewed away gradually to the right. If he did notice it, his methods would naturally lead him to content himself with his caddies's remark-'ye heeled that yin,' or 'Ye jist sliced it.' ... But a scientific man is not to be put off with such flimsy verbiage as that. He must know more. What is 'Heeling', what is 'slicing', and why would either operation (if it could be thoroughly carried out) send a ball as if to cover point, thence to long slip, and finally behind back-stop? These, as Falstaff said, are 'questions to be asked. — Peter Guthrie Tait

All the times, all the very many times, I had been forced to thwart and stifle my own nature seemed to gather together then, in that hot and dismal corridor. I heard a rushing sound in my head and felt a pressure in my breast, like floodwaters rising behind a flimsy dike. Before I knew I did it, the soup bowl was rising in my hand as if elevated by some supernatural force. Then, its yellow-gray contents were running down the nurse's pudgy face. — Geraldine Brooks

I finally drift back to sleep. I'm in the darkness. The molecules of my mind are still scattered, and I float through oily black space, trying to swipe them up like fireflies. Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below. Hoping you pull up anything at all. — Isaac Marion

From a distance the rushing of the torrent delights and uplifts us, but it rocks us in a flimsy boat, we are overwhelmed by despair. The same applies to danger. — Franz Grillparzer

You think you know. Then you lower your guard and act as though everything's just great. With the passage of time, you stop paying as much attention to things as you should. You're confident. What more can you do? Life is smiling on you. So is luck. You can afford your dreams. Everything's fine, everything blesses you ... and then, without warning, the sky falls in on your head. And once you're flat on your back, you realize that your life, your whole life - with its ups and downs, its pains and pleasures, its promises and failures, hangs and has always hung by a thread as flimsy and imperceptible as the threads in a spider's web. Suddenly, the slightest sound terrifies you, and no longer feel like believing in anything whatsoever. All you want to do is close your eyes and think no more — Yasmina Khadra

Either the phone is so seriously thin and flimsy that it is bendable with mere physical force, which I cannot believe given the extensive tests Apple would have done. Or
and this is far more plausible
somehow the energy and excitement of the 10 million people who purchased iPhones has awakened their mind powers and caused the phones to bend. — Uri Geller

I'm not going to give my love a set of flimsy fucking brushes, am I? Only long, hard, phallic shaped things will do for a girl of her appetites. — Kylie Scott

Zeke's snort sounded suspiciously like laughter. "Allie, you're a beautiful, exotic-looking vampire girl with a katana. Trust me, if anyoneis going to attract attention, it's not going to me."
I didn't answer as we crossed the flimsy, creaking bridge into the lair of the vampire king. We didn't talk to each other for several minutes. If Zeke asked, I would've said that I was thinking of how to fing everyone, but that wasn't entirely true. I was thinking of the others and how i was going to get them out alive ... but I kept being distracted by the thougth that Zeke had called me beautiful. — Julie Kagawa

Words are like seeds, I think, planted into our hearts at a tender age. They take root in us as we grow, settling deep into our souls. The good words plant well. They flourish and find homes in our hearts. They build trunks around our spines, steadying us when we're feeling most flimsy; planting our feet firmly when we're feeling most unsure. But the bad words grow poorly. Our trunks infest and spoil until we are hollow and housing the interests of others and not our own. We are forced to eat the fruit those words have borne, held hostage by the branches growing arms around our necks, suffocating us to death, one word at a time. — Tahereh Mafi

Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology
a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become 'myth' in the anthropological sense. By this I do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful myths are powerful and often partly true. [ ... ] The myth of progress has sometimes served us well
those of us seated at the best tables, anyway
and may continue to do so. [ ... ] Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. (4-5) — Ronald Wright

Rich people don't have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their "work" is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention. Why didn't I reread my F. Scott Fitzgerald sooner? I might have saved myself some time. — Sergio Troncoso

Felt is not the easiest thing to animate. It's very flimsy. — Spike Jonze

Secrets...were cancers. Secrets festered. Secrets ate away at your innards, leaving behind nothing but a flimsy husk. — Harlan Coben

Truth can look so flimsy and feeble sometimes. It's one of the things I hold against it. — Sharon Cameron

It's funny because you always think a real friendship can weather any storm, but human relationships can be as flimsy as paper boats in a tsunami."
~ page 97 — Steven Parlato

Without the rain there is no beauty in the summer. Rain gives depth, it gives beauty, and it gives roots. If a plant is only exposed to sun and no rain, it becomes dry, flimsy, and dead. Too many times we curse the rain in our lives-suffering, trials, hardships-but the truth is without rain nothing grows. — Jefferson Bethke

Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression "it turns out" to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors "I read somewhere that ... " or the craven "they say that ... " because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I? — Douglas Adams

The whole world is pressing in on me, like a weight on my chest, slowly pushing me down and down. And there's nothing between me and this weight but my flimsy skin. It's not enough. It won't protect me. It doesn't keep anything out. The outside will keep pressing in until my ribs are crushed, and then my organs, my heart and liver and stomach ... — Natalie Standiford

That's what the enemy wants. He wants you living in a state of defeat. Your defenses down. Your resolve weak and flimsy. Surrendering to an army of insecurities and misdiagnosis instead of courageously thriving in the sophisticated security of your identity in Christ. — Priscilla Shirer

People always think killing requires a force: a cup of poison tipped into a mouth, a knife parting flesh from bone, a fist brought down repeatedly.
Wrong.
Here's how you kill: You stay silent, you make bargains that peel the layers off your soul one by one, you build a scaffolding of flimsy excuses and live your life on them. I may have killed to save, but I killed all the same. — Roshani Chokshi

Civilization is a fiction which becomes a fact only as long as everyone can believe in it. It is the cynic, rather than the rebel, who pulls down the whole flimsy structure periodically throughout history. — Helen McCloy

To large numbers of American citizens life in certain parts of the country becomes intolerably hazardous. They may be seized on any pretext, however flimsy, and put to death with horrible tortures. No government pretending to be civilized can go on condoning such atrocities. Either it must make every possible effort to put them down or it must suffer the scorn and contempt of Christendom. — H.L. Mencken

In Liberation, you stand alone. You stand alone because you need no supports of any kind. You need no supports because you have realized that the very notion of a separate you no longer exists; that there is nothing to support; that the whole ego experience was a flimsy illusion. So you stand alone but never, never lonely because everywhere you look, all you see is That, and You are That. — Adyashanti

Ghosts

Take shape under moonlight,
materialize in dreams.
Shadows. Silhouettes
of what is no more. But

ghosts don't

bother me. The day brings
bigger things to worry about
than flimsy remains of
yesterday. No, spooks don't

scare me.

Gauzy apparitions might
prank your psyche or
agitate your nightmares,
but lacking

flesh and blood

they are powerless
to hurt you-cannot hope
to inflict the kind of damage
that real, live

people do. — Ellen Hopkins

I got lucky. As previously shared, April 16, 2009 found me face down on the disgustingly filthy floor of a very expensive apartment, close to alcoholic death. Left to me, there were two things which I considered of value: a full bottle of sleeping pills perfectly capable of ending my life, and a working cell phone. I used the phone. That desperate call to my family doctor saved my life and, along with the help of many people, connected the dots to the place where I am now. That flimsy reed of hope has remained unbroken ever since, and has grown stronger and more resilient each day. — Brian Wacik

The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and vulnerable; their doors are flimsy pieces of plyboard or sacks hanging and lank. Children and chickens and dogs scratch in the red, raw soil and stare at us as we drive through their open, eroding lives. — Alexandra Fuller

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue. — Wallace Stegner

All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don't buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that's a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make." This — Timothy Ferriss

Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below. — Isaac Marion

There on the landing sits the typewriter. It is clogged with dust, the ribbon dried and flimsy. Looking at it gives Felix a feeling close to vertigo. He realises he can replicate in his head the exact sound it used to make. The clac-clac-a-clac of the metal letters hitting the paper, the ribbon raising itself each time to make the impression. The machine-gun fire of it, when the work was going well. The stops and pauses when it wasn't, to allow for a sigh, a draw on a cigarette. The ding every time the carriage reached its limit. The whirr as the page was snatched out, then the rolling ratcheting as a new one was wound in. — Maggie O'Farrell

This is what comes of wearing those damned flimsy slippers outside. You must have walked right over an adder who was sunning himself ... and when he saw one of those pretty little ankles, he decided to take a nibble." He paused, and said something beneath his breath that sounded like, "I can't say that I blame him. — Lisa Kleypas

Harry had never in all his life had such a Christmas dinner. A hundred fat, roast turkeys; mountains of roast and boiled potatoes; platters of chipolatas; tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick, rich gravy and cranberry sauce - and stacks of wizard crackers every few feet along the table. These fantastic party favors were nothing like the feeble Muggle ones the Dursleys usually bought, with their little plastic toys and their flimsy paper hats inside. Harry pulled a wizard cracker with Fred and it didn't just bang, it went off with a blast like a cannon and engulfed them all in a cloud of blue smoke, while from the inside exploded a rear admiral's hat and several live, white mice. Up at the High Table, Dumbledore had swapped his pointed wizard's hat for a flowered bonnet, and was chuckling merrily at a joke Professor Flitwick had just read him. Flaming — J.K. Rowling

A reminder (Japan's earthquake and tsunami) how flimsy our sophisticated modern world really is — George Alagiah

She pretended to find dust ruffles feminine and cozy, but really they were just flimsy barriers beyond which lurked the malign viscosity under her bed. — Jincy Willett

Human ... I don't know what that word means ... Tell me what defines it. What sets it apart? Are you going to tell me its love? A crocodile will defend her brood to the death. Hope? A lion will stalk its prey for days. Faith? Who is to say what gods populate an orangutan's imagination. We build? So do termites. We dream? House cats do that on the windowsill ... We live in a shabby edifice ... hastily erected over a span of ten thousand years, and we draw he flimsy curtains to hide the truth from ourselves. — Rick Yancey

In America, religious dissent is as vital as it is elusive. Like the secretions of the pituitary, the juices of dissent are essential to ongoing life even if we do not always know precisely how, when or where they perform their tasks, and the not knowing - the flimsy, filmy elusiveness - is supremely characteristic of America's expressions of religious dissent. For in the United States no stalwart orthodoxy stands ever ready to parry the sharp thrust or clever feints of dissent. — Edwin Gaustad

Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,
To our bower at the lily root.
Overhead the old umbrellas of summer Wither like pithless hands.
There is little shelter.
Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank
Dominion. The stars are no nearer. Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink The liquor of indolence, and all thing sink Into a soft caul of forgetfulness. The fugitive colors die. Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,
The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.
Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppetmaster
Wear masks of horn to bed. This is not death, it is something safer. The wingy myths won't tug at us anymore: The molts are tongueless that sang from above the water Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,
And how a god flimsy as a baby's finger
Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air. — Sylvia Plath

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name. — Brian W. Aldiss

GENTLE READER:
You, sir, are an anarchist, and Miss Manners is frightened to have anything to do with you. It is true that questioning the table manners of others is rude. But to overthrow the accepted conventions of society, on the flimsy grounds that you have found them silly, inefficient and discomforting, is a dangerous step toward destroying civilization. — Judith Martin

Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month's labor in the farmer's almanac, to restore our tone and spirits. — Henry David Thoreau