Fraying Quotes & Sayings

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans. — Marian Wright Edelman

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. 'Home!'...it was a warm word to use for that great, weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was somehow cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now, and dying from day to day. Home was a place you lived in, love was a thing you didn't fool yourself about, joy was a word you applied to a good Charleston, happiness was a term of hypocrisy used to bluff other people, a father was an individual who enjoyed his own existence, a husband was a man you lived with and kept going in spirits. As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. Frayed! It was as if the very material you were made of was cheap stuff, and was fraying out to nothing. — D.H. Lawrence

To escape the deepening grip of multinational corporations and the Coca-colonisation of the weird. Out here, you could still have your mind eaten by an alien phantom, stumble upon a lost city, or discover a fraying thread of some kind of weird quantumised metamaterial that could kick-start a new industrial revolution and make you a billionaire. Out here were places not yet mapped. Old dreams and deep mysteries. A world wild and strange and still mostly unknown. — Paul McAuley

Blue opened and closed her chilly fists. The top edges of her fingerless gloves were fraying; she'd done a bad job knitting them last year, but they had a certain trashy chic to them. If she hadn't been so vain, Blue could've worn the boring but functional gloves she'd been given for Christmas. But she was vain, so instead she had her fraying fingerless gloves, infinitely cooler though also colder , and no one to see them but Neeve and the dead. — Maggie Stiefvater

Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition, subject to fragmentation and to rot. Or that everything was born to die. — Marcus Aurelius

The flyscreen door is torn at the edges. Fraying. I open it and knock on the wood. The sound rhymes with my heartbeat. — Markus Zusak

if she wanted to change into them. 'I guess this dress is ruined.' Bernice looked — Sheila O'Flanagan

Her voice sounded like a string that was fraying. — Jodi Picoult

Your inner light is your brightest light. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good. — David Brooks

Today, it's almost the outlier if people are not photographing what they ate and then sharing that in real time. — Danny Meyer

Anyway, I'd be more worried about them hearing us than seeing us. You make a lot of noise, Lizzy."
She gasped and hit his shoulder, trying to push him away.
"I do not!" she said, even though she was well aware she'd practically been howling at the moon not five minutes ago.
He didn't let her go. He kept pressing kisses against the soft skin beneath her ear, his tongue darting out occasionally to taste her.
"I like it. I like it a lot," he whispered against her skin. — Sarah Mayberry

I can't kill him and he can't keep me alive. The world we've lived in together is an illusion that can't be maintained. The edges are fraying, curling away to reveal the harsh reality beneath. The lion and the lamb do not lie down together. It just can't be. — Kitty Thomas

Telomeres are the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes in cells. Chromosomes carry the genetic information. Telomeres are buffers. They are like the tips of shoelaces. If you lose the tips, the ends start fraying. — Elizabeth Blackburn

There were things she wanted to say, but they were all jumbled up in her head and if she tried they'd come out backwards and mixed up and wrong.

There were things she needed to say, but she was hanging on by a fraying thread and feared if she tried the thread would break, sending her plummeting alone into the abysm.

There were things she would have to say, but they should wait for later. After. — G.S. Jennsen

I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another? — John Banville

The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale. — Ilka Chase

There's no need to get that way. It's your own thoughts that keep you young, Dick. And age hasn't anything to do with it. It's a question of your state of mind." "I don't care about all that. Oh! Jake - if I could live tremendously, and then die." "What do you call 'tremendously'?" "I don't know - but there are a whole lot of things I want to know and to feel. They won't ever happen though. Fate'll be against me." "Don't talk like a fool. There isn't such a thing as Fate. Everything depends on yourself," he said. "Everything?" "Yes." "I wish I could — Daphne Du Maurier

I think we [Americans] are going to look back and realize that the civil liberties that we've given up in the name of security, the authority that we've given Democratic and Republican presidents, all have contributed to a fraying of the fabric of our democratic republic. — Jeremy Scahill

Pass legislation. When Obama signs, you've shown seriousness and the ability to govern. When he vetoes, you've clarified the differences between party philosophies and prepared the ground for 2016. — Charles Krauthammer

On the outside, I appeared in grand shape that season. I was young and in love with a fabulous girl, hanging out at a beautiful, hip spot with true friends. But inside things were fraying and beginning to fragment. A seed of unrest lay behind my smile. — David Fitzpatrick

If you have a tendency to find yourself in MacGyveresque situations, go ahead and choose a synthetic rope to craft with. I don't want you cursing my name as you hang from a cliff by your swiftly fraying Monkey's Fist necklace. — Maura Madden

The pain was swift and immediate. It wasn't stabbing, or fiery, or unbearable. More like a fraying of my inner self, a few threads tearing away, vanishing into the ether. I winced and stifled a gasp, — Julie Kagawa

To a traveler paying his first visit, [San Francisco] has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. — Fitz Hugh Ludlow

You can expect what you inspect. — W. Edwards Deming

With the morbid realisation that his sexual being was a dull thing, a lifeless thing, a mass-produced marionette with chipped paint and fraying strings — Will Self

My father was a small-businessman, and if he didn't get up and go to work, there would be no business. — Hillary Clinton

Jules could have sworn there was a devilish glint in the shopkeepers eye.
'I find today I am in need of a bonnet.'
Mr. Postlethwaite was silent. And then his eyes crept toward the marquess's hairline.
'It will be a gift for a woman, Mr. Postlethwaite.'
'Of course, sir.'
The marquess wished the 'of course' sounded a bit more sincere. He'd scarcely been in the shop for more than three minutes and already his dignity was fraying. — Julie Anne Long

Archbishop Mannix was possessed of the clearest intellect I have ever encountered. He prayed regularly for five hours and more each day, this in the midst of a life of intense activity. When he was well over ninety, I once asked him about the precise quality of the Faith which had sustained him. His answer? 'My Faith has always been like a thin silken thread, fraying perpetually at the brink of a precipice over which I hang. Yet the thread has never snapped. — Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria

I look up at the sky, wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don't. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn't be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative often self-centered nature that still doubts itself
that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I'm not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I've carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect. — Haruki Murakami

I love acting, but I am a mom, and the roles just weren't coming because of a mixture of things: because I'm not ambitious, and because I'm older, and I had a baby. I really felt like I had said a graceful and completely happy goodbye to acting in a significant way. And I had sort of made my peace with that. — Jennifer Jason Leigh