Like Broken Glass Quotes & Sayings

Picking up the pieces of a broken relationship is like gathering up shards of glass with bear hands and eyes closed. — Michael Faudet

For half an hour they poked about in a happy dusty dream, through the junk and broken furniture and ornaments. It was like reading the story of somebody's life, Jane thought, as she gazed at the tiny matchstick masts of the ship sailing motionless forever in the green glass bottle. All these things had been used once, had been part of every day in the house below. Someone has slept on the bed, anxiously watched the minutes on the clock, pounced joyfully on each magazine as it arrived. But those people were long dead, or gone away, and now the oddments of their lives were piled up here, forgotten. She found herself feeling rather sad. — Susan Cooper

Listen to the sea ... it sounds like a coffin being dragged over broken glass. — Caroline B. Cooney

More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum. — Henry Miller

Broken glass showered from the windows. Chunks of the walls bounced off the pavement and the cars parked along the curb, crushing into smaller pieces. The asphalt on the street split in places into long ribbon-like slashes. The ground continued rolling like the deck of a ship. The noise of the destruction, screams of terrified people, and the car alarms mixed into a concerto of horror. — A.O. Peart

I was literally seeing stars, and every ragged breath I took felt like I was trying to breathe through broken glass.
On the upside, my crush on Archer was totally gone. Over. Once a boy has slammed his kneecap into your rib cage, I think any romantic feeling should naturally go the way of the ghost. — Rachel Hawkins

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball. — Anton Chekhov

How I admired Natalie for the simple, but hard-won irreplaceable things she'd created and fostered by having a little trust and an ounce of faith in the world. The willingness to take leaps in spite of knowing how fragile it all is, how easily everything can break - how it can fall and shatter like broken glass in an instant. — Christine Carbo

I closed my eyes and willed my breath to slow, my conscious mind to fold itself inward. I could feel heat pulsing from my daughter's head, her frantic thoughts whirling like broken glass. I loosened my hold on my body and dropped into that whirlpool. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Hemingway had a handy dictum. You want to know if something is morally right? Listen to your stomach. If it sits like broken glass, then it's morally wrong. — Ken Bruen

Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions. — Anne Lamott

Afghan Girl

Ice blue eyes that look to the morning sky as I knit the pieces and remnants of my life. I have No books, no paper, no pencils, and no black boards. I look at the holes in my life as I see the hills of the Appalachians that echo. I think to myself, who will I marry? Is my life-like Pari?

These strings please come together.

Snowflakes give me hope, and my dreams dance all around me. I'll put another log on the fire. I watch the brown paper bag over the broken glass pane letting the cold wind in; I'll take some of these remnants and stuff it.

These strings are come together.

Mama told me that life would be hard. I bartered for flour the other day, and the chickens ain't laying no eggs. I struggle with life and these strings. My hands are worn and tired. Now, I have granny square hands.
I am unclean, unblemished, and finished,

Afghan girl. — Edna Stewart

Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it's better to leave them broken than try to hurt yourself putting it back together. — D. Love

SIMONE
"It comes up inside me and it won't go away. It comes up, like a slow geyser of thick chemicals, and spreads through me. It makes me want something. I want it so much but I don't know what it is. It comes up from the bottom like a small seed, just floating there, and it bleeds around inside, looking for me."

The empty loading dock corridor. Empty trailers. Her shoes on broken glass. Ice cubes. Her hands.

SIMONE
"And it makes me so sad that I will never figure out what it is, just enough to let it be, all by itself. And because I want it, it won't go away. It needs me to need it. And want me back. I can feel it moving. I can hear it and I can see it. I can almost touch it, and it is some kind of life. It is beautiful and warm and gentle and it is your friend. And then it turns, when you try to put it away, or when you can't carry it anymore, and it isn't allowed. — Jeff Wood

Dennis asked, "Do you enjoy jazz? Because I love it, and I know of a place downtown where we could go." "And then we can have broken glass and arsenic for dinner!" I felt like replying, because I barely tolerated jazz when I encountered it in elevators or dental offices. But I considered that when you meet somebody who really loves something, the high-road thing to do is to try to love it, too, so I wrote back, "That sounds great! — Augusten Burroughs

How is he so rich and hot and normal?"
I shake my head, "He's rich and hot, but he's not normal. I see a sickness in his eyes. They're broken like mine. Like a mirror with cracks in it but none of the glass has fallen out of the frame. — Tara Brown

Broken glass. It's just like glitter, isn't it? — Pete Doherty

I've never felt this lonely.
But then I've never witnessed someone falling apart. Even his blank stare, as he watches his world crumble around himself, is beautiful. And I've never seen someone break so perfectly.
And all I can do is watch because he won't let me in.
Because just like his darkness, his misery is his own.
But what does that make me?
A passerby?
No.
I can't just stand by.
Why doesn't he understand that I can't watch him fall apart? That the sharp ends of the broken glass that is his heart, cut me too. — Kady Hunt

If you've never known someone your own age who's died, you can't imagine what it feels like. It's as if you were walking on a glass floor and it suddenly shatters and now you're falling and falling and there's broken glass in the air all around you and no bottom in sight. — Todd Strasser

Fortune is like glass - the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken. — Publilius Syrus

I just sit there. The morning started out like crystal, but the day has turned to broken glass. — Sharon M. Draper

As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey? — Eddie Condon

Honey, you can't call dibs on a human being." Her tone rose high enough to shatter glass. "Like calling something mine makes it so, because if it did, I'd be driving around town in a Porsche instead of Granddaddy's broken down Ford. Ain't nothing here that was yours." Using the tray, she backed him against the office door. "Anything you left behind is at the DAV thrift store. They put a price tag on things, and let me tell you, yours wasn't worth much. — Cindy Skaggs

Can't believe the school year is almost over, Beth said, in that voice that sounded like a teenage girl who had a throat full of broken glass and lug nuts. — Rachel Hawkins

Thomas closes the gap between us and kisses me. Hard. This is not wet and sloppy like his playful kisses. Or dry and desperate like Percy's. Or teasing like the king's.

No. This kiss is eloquent and alive and speaks direcetly to my soul. My heart ruptures, and the spliters freeze and tumble all around us with the musical sound of broken glass. — Katherine Longshore

You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew ... — Francesca Lia Block

At the tips of the feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light ... still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again. — Alice Sebold

I thought it was another avalanche. This morning it was terrible."
"What was?" asked Sniff.
"The avalanche, of course," answered the Hemulen. "Quite terrible! Rocks the size of houses bouncing about like hail-stones! My best glass jar was broken, and I myself had to move quite quickly to get out of the way."
"I'm afraid we happened to knock a few stones down as we were passing," said Snufkin. "It's so easily done walking on these tracks."
"Do you mean to say it was you who made the avalanche?" said the Hemulen.
"Well
yes
sort of," Snufkin answered.
"I never thought very much of you," said the Hemulen slowly, "and now I think even less. — Tove Jansson

People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . "It's the glass," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle." ... An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in - a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck."

The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new. — John Steinbeck

It was like stepping barefoot on a sharp bit of broken glass. She pulled the glass out and ran on, but the pain remained. — Kristin Hannah

Steve Forman is a brutally funny writer. His no-nonsense, unadorned style begs comparison to Dashiell Hammett, but Hammett's humor at its darkest never hit home this hard. Reading of Eddie Perlmutter's exploits is like rolling in an aisle paved with broken glass and wanting to do it all over again two minutes later. — Loren D. Estleman

Sometimes it is like juggling with broken glass because both things are very sensitive and have to be handled with care. I can't let the career be neglected and I can't let my family and children be neglected either. — Kelly Price

Stop there, Breathe.
For a while you need to leave, live.
Stop pushing your face into that photo called
past, stuck in the photo frame of time. Stop
scratching your heart, give the wound time to
heal. For i know, when the photo frame falls
down, the broken pieces of glass fall apart,
just like memories. But no, you want to keep
it to the chest, close to your heart. You know
you shouldn't but you're too coward to let go.
It keep sucking your heart, into a black hole
of muddy memories. Making you a dark
shattered soul, incapable of finding solace.
So stop. For a while let's just live. Let's just
breathe. Let's just love ourselves, for it's you
who need it the most. — Sameer Khan

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody - told it to me because "Jay Gatsby" had broken up like glass against Tom's hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out. — F Scott Fitzgerald

His broken heart was unfeeling, like shattered glass in an acid bath. — Pete Townshend

Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass and rags. — George Eliot

The trouble with rules, though, is that you'll always be tempted to break one- for the right reasons, due to unavoidable circumstances, because it feels as if there's no other choice. And once you break one, the rest seem like so much broken glass. The damage is already done. — Stacey Kade

Eventually, there was a small grunt of assent from Tom, and he curled his warm body behind Baltsaros's. With a gentle hand, he carefully manoeuvred Baltsaros into a suitable position so he could penetrate him. Though he couldn't see Tom, the captain could tell how apprehensive he was. The captain had to laugh. "I'm not made of glass," he said, opening his eyes. Jon's cheek dimpled in the briefest of smiles. Tom mumbled something against his skin; though he didn't catch what it was, it sounded like either a prayer or a curse. Or, he thought with a smile, it could be both. However, his levity was broken a moment later when Tom's cockhead pushed hard against his opening and began to slide tight into his body. — Bey Deckard

He was the one she was doing all this for, but sometimes she missed him so much it felt like she swallowed broken glass. — Cassandra Clare

Beautiful like all the Shadowhunters were beautiful, like moonlight shearing off the edges of broken glass: lovely and deadly. Beautiful things, cruel things, cruel in that way that only people who absolutely believed in the rightness of their cause could be cruel. — Cassandra Clare

Dana's window? More like her snow globe, Janice thought. She pictured Dana standing in a tiny glass-enclosed world, snow gently falling around her. Her world could be shaken but never broken. She was far too insulated. — Lynn Steward

In that moment her heart fell out of her chest. Like the glass filled vase he had brought to her, it dropped. It was shattered into a million small pieces. — J.B. McGee

Ty: All the lights and the shouting and the people. It's like broken glass in my head.
Kit: What about fighting? Battles, killing demons, that must be pretty noisy and loud?
Ty: Battle is different. Battle is what Shadowhunters do. Fighting is in my body, not my mind. As long as I can wear headphones... — Cassandra Clare

The more bleach in the bedsheets, the greater Chastity's impulse to roll around in them. A party would be thrown, she decided, the kind that would tell a small story in the contents of the dustpan the next morning. Detached sequins and mint leaves muddled by high heels, shrimp tales mixed in with a few shards of broken glass, a crust of bread. She rolled in her bleached sheets until they wrapped around her like a storm, and she fell asleep in the eye of it. — Amelia Gray

What do I do now?
I didn't think my heart could break any more than it already has.
The pieces still inside of me feel like broken glass.
Every time I take a breath, they stab into me.
It never ends ... — H.M. Ward

As soon as it's out of my mouth, I cringe, realizing that it's probably pretty crappy to complain about your parents to someone who doesn't have any. It's like bitching that your shoes are too tight to someone who's walking across broken glass barefoot. — Katja Millay

In the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred, at least. Like the sidewalks, it's red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top. No one goes through those gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even as far as the Wall, from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible. Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men's Salvaging early this morning. I didn't hear the bells. Perhaps I've become used to them. We — Margaret Atwood

Relationship are like glasses, once it's broken it never be like before, as broken glass remain with the broken piece stains ever ... — Debolina Bhawal

People who leave their cars on the street with tape covering their broken windows are obviously too trusting. I mean, when your car did have glass for a window, someone broke into it. How is tape any more of a deterrent? What are the thieves going to say? Ooh, that like looks like duct tape, we can't beat that. Let's look for one with scotch or masking. — Aaron Karo

The ideological are individuals ultimately swamped by the complexities of modern life and political and economic relations; they have deliberately attached themselves to some caricatural maven like Falwell or Limbaugh who speaks to their manipulable pathos. The gulf between such individuals' education or intellectual competence or information and the actual issues of our times is simply too great. They were bred to be culture-media for false consciousness, junkies who crawl on their bellies across broken glass for another hit of "clarifying wisdom" from some ideological Pope. — Kenny Smith

She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass. — Mina Loy

Relationships are like broken glass. Sometimes it's better to leave them broken than hurt yourself trying to put the pieces back together — Alex Haditaghi

M.F.K. Fisher says it well: There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. It's like religion. If you have a glass of water and a crust of bread with someone and you really share it, it is much more than just bread and water. I really believe that. Breaking bread is a simile for sharing bread ... you cannot swallow if you are angry or hateful. You choke a bit ... it's all very betraying, how we eat. — Simon Carey Holt

Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken it can rarely be put back together exactly the same way. — Charles Kingsley

There were sharp little blows in the music, and waves of quick, fine notes that burst and rolled like the thin, clear ringing of broken glass. There were slow notes, as if the cords of the violins trembled in hesitation, tense with the fullness of sound, taking a few measured steps before the leap into the explosion of laughter. — Ayn Rand

Some relationships are like glass its better to leave them broken than to hurt yourself trying to put the pieces back together again.
When you start reading the Bunna Man, most of my readers hate Dre and then they realize that Dre doesn't really have any power. The only power he has is the one Saf gave him. What happens now is that by you reach the middle of the story, your anger turns from Dre to Saf cause you realize that Saf is the catalyst behind her own misery. If she'd leave Dre alone. Her suffering would end — Crystal Evans

He was like a shattered stained-glass window: something beautiful that's broken; a million colours fallen on the ground where no light can get through. — Glenda Millard

Intense sunlight rained down on a half-submerged city. Waves crashed between buildings that stood like waterlogged tombstones. Skyscrapers of smashed glass and twisted rusting metal jutted from the churning swell as islands of broken dreams. A familiar tower with a familiar clock face ... Big Ben. London stared back at Blue. What was left of it. A sea-drowned cemetery for a time and a place long dead. — Kev Heritage

I do have someone that I work with and she is amazing and I definitely don't have unmitigated abusive tendencies towards her. She is very sweet. I also know what that is like. I have heard my agent thinking he has hit mute on the phone before he, you know, physically unleashes broken glass and cellphones at his poor assistant. It is a tough job under the best of circumstances. I understand that. — Ryan Reynolds

I could barely breathe as I fled down the steps, like something was stuck in my throat. I couldn't tell what flavor it was; it tasted salty like tears, but it was sharp as broken glass. — Laura Bickle

It's an old church and smells like a museum - in a good way, a survived-lots-of-shit-and-still-standing kind of way. Something about the stained-glass windows works for me too. If I were to get all deep on you, I could say the idea of all those broken pieces being made into something so damn pretty appeals to me. Good thing I'm not that profound. (54) — Chevy Stevens

Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Why was it, she sometimes wondered, that in dreams we can't do the simplest things? Like a crying puppy is standing on some broken glass and you want to pick it up and brush the shards off its pads but you can't because you're balancing a ball on your head. Or you're driving and there's this old guy on crutches and you go, to Mr. Feder, your Driver's Ed teacher, Should I swerve? And he's like, Uh, probably. But then you hear this big clunk and Feder makes a negative mark in his book. — George Saunders

We are all broken in some way. But it's all the shattered pieces that give us depth. Like stained glass, it's how the pieces and colors fit together that truly makes us beautiful. — Adriana Law

Some stories aren't meant to be told. The more they get told, the more they change from what they once were, worn down and smooth like pieces of sea glass too beautiful to have ever been broken bottles. — Caren Gussoff

If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, 'Let's listen to it on forty-five!' And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill. — Augusten Burroughs

Each individual cat got up and did his thing. It wasn't like today where they come down and put down some nice linoleum so you don't get burnt up. I mean, we used to b-boy right in the middle of the park with broken glass everywhere! And you'd get up and you'd be all scratched and burised and bleeding and you would be ready to go right back in the circle. You'd just wipe the glass off your elbows and go right back in. — Jazzy Jay

What you are calling people to experience you must be experiencing yourself. What the Holy Spirit is to do in the hearts of your listeners he will normally do first in and through you. You must be something like a clear glass through which people can see a broken but gospel-changed soul in such a way that they want it for themselves. — Timothy J. Keller

I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop ... this ... fucking ... feeling. — Jerry Stahl

The journey comes with baggage, yes. And heartbreak. But there are also many gifts. In a sense, we're all cobblers. We're all a bit like Brother Joseph, piecing together our faith, one shard of broken glass at a time. — Rachel Held Evans

I finally understand what love is. It isn't rainbows and butterflies. It isn't always pretty. Sometimes it's jagged like broken glass, and sometimes it hurts. But love, the type of love that's real - the love Demetri has shown me - it's selfless, it's persistent. Real love pushes your boundaries, it pulls until you snap, and then when you think you can't take anymore, it's — Rachel Van Dyken

And she thinks perhaps that is what love is: letting someone else see that part of you that shatters like glass...They will grow old together, broken together, and as long as they both don't completely shatter at the same time, they might find a way to pick each other off the ground. — Thomas Christopher Greene

Silent sobbing. No one sees.
Weeping like the willow trees.
Feel my heart about to pop.
Need to make the aching stop.
See moon's shimmer softly pass.
On the shards of broken glass. — Madeleine Kuderick

Emperor's Soul pg 123:
Attempts to Forge the window to a better version of itself had repeatedly failed; each time, after five minutes or so, the window had reverted to its cracked, gap-sided self.
Then Shai had found a bit of colored glass rammed into one side of the frame. The window, she realized, had once been a stained glass piece, like many in the palace. It had been broken, and whatever had shattered the window had also bent the frame, producing those gaps that let in the frigid breeze.
Rather than repairing it as it had been meant to be, someone had put ordinary glass into the window and left it to crack. A stamp from Shai in the bottom right corner had stored the window, rewriting its history so that a caring master craftsman had discovered the fallen window and remade it. That seal had taken immediately. Even after ll this time, the window had seen itself as something beautiful. — Brandon Sanderson

Truth, like honor and courage and love, does not come in shades of gray. You either have it or you don't - there is no in between. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to uncover it, and sometimes it is clear and simple as a sunrise. Also like honor and courage and love, sometimes the truth can be lost, and you have to find your way back to it, crawling over fields of broken glass and dead bodies, your knees and hands bloody and raw, until you get to it and it's even sweeter than before because of what you suffered on the way. — J.T. Geissinger

The patches are the stories. Hold onto that. And the muddy zigzag of ducktape against the cracked doorglass. There's four kids who sleep here, a nuff for the fingers on each otherses hands. There's room in each of them for one important thing. They're a band. It's not they're in a band. They're a band. Four spikes of ducktape, up and down, like mountain peaks or a sawblade. Every band's got a sign, something to sew on your jacket, gouge on the wall at a show. Four spikes up and down say MEATHEADS, and you picked a fucked window to knock at, tourist. They're the best band in the world. — Noah Wareness

...you have to just go on. It's sort of like a bird flying into a plate glass window. And then you just sort of pick yourself up, shake yourself off, and check for anything broken, and go back to work. — Sally Mann

Sometimes I drink coffee at 03:57am, only I call it beer, and it's really purple wine, disguised as clear distilled water, taken from my invisible car's radiator. She used to like radiator water too, so this also serves as a self-reminder to never share a glass with someone who has had hepatitis. Glasses are the main source of broken relationships. I mean glass hearts, as they only bend and change their shape under extremely high temperatures, which, unfortunately, are technically impossible to achieve in some places, like Soviet Russia, where nothing ever happens, because it doesn't really exist anymore. — Will Advise

And perhaps, because I liked you. His laughter was bitter, like broken glass. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Some voices get hard and tight with age, some rough like broken glass. — Shannon Hale

Old lady, if I die I'd like you to do one small thing for me. I want you to build a one-hundred-acre museum dedicated to my memory. Bronze my clothing and possessions. Have at least three hundred marble statues erected of me in my most dashing poses. One of these statues should stand one hundred feet tall and greet ships as they float down the Hudson River. One of the fourteen wings of the museum should have an amusement park with the world's fastest roller coaster inside. None of these rides should be equipped with safety devices. You can license some of the space to fast-food restaurants and ice-cream parlors but nothing should be healthy or nutritious. The gift shop should sell stuffed Puck dolls packed with broken glass and asbestos. There's a more detailed list in my room. Puck saidduble — Michael Buckley

The morning has broken - I had thought of the morning like an egg that had split with a crack and was spreading. Before us lay all the green of the green country of England, with its rivers and it's roads and it's hedges, it's churches, it's chimneys, it's rising threads of smoke. The chimneys grew taller, the roads and rivers wider, the threads of smoke more thick, the farther off the country spread; until at last, at the farthest point of all, they made a smudge, a stain, a darkness - a darkness, like the darkness of the coal in a fire - a darkness that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and the golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light.
'London,' I said 'Oh, London! — Sarah Waters

It was beautiful not despite but because of the friction it has had to endure. It had been thrashed around, but instead of being destroyed, it was improved with every scratch and scrape, sculpted. In fact, the scuffs themselves are what gave it its quiet splendor; they are responsible for turning a simple piece of glass (which could have just as easily been trash) into a gem. It wouldn't be the same without the wear and tear; it wouldn't be something pretty enough to be turned into jewelry if it hadn't been damn near broken. I closed my fist around this tear-shaped gem and thought about my own uneven edges, my own abrasions, and things I have endured that have, instead of breaking me, completed me, prepared me for the next tumble. Its odd beauty was hard-won. It came from reinventing itself. From having risen to the top of the discard pile. Like a phoenix, from victim to victor. (325) — Wendy Blackburn

As Samantha wrapped the ornament in paper, and placed it in a bag, Mrs. Ryan said, "Hearts are like that spun glass, beautiful and fragile, and easily broken." With a Mona Lisa smile, she turned and left the store. — Tamara Hoffa

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Since you walked out on me I'm getting lovelier by the hour. I glow like a corpse in the dark. No one sees how round and sharp my eyes have grown how my carcass looks like a glass urn, how I hold up things in the rags of my hands, the way I can stand through crippled by lust. No, there's just your cruelty circling my head like a bright rotting halo. — Nina Cassian

When you're more mature, you do start telling the truth, in odd situations. 'I'm sorry, I've broken a glass here. Is that expensive? I'll pay for it. I'm sorry.' And you do that so that people in the room might go, 'What a strong personality that person has. I like to have sex with people with strong personalities.' — Eddie Izzard

Why are you so hard on yourself?
I love you just the way you are,
with your withered coat and wet scarf dangling like a spotless chandelier.
The snow banks in Montreal are high, but I can see your trace, and silent grace and tin cup through the paned window.
The precipitation melts your face, distorting your expression through the aged glass; broken, when I threw ancient stones to get your attention
as a child.
I wanted a friend. The honest kind. — V.S. Atbay

Beyond our grim circle, the underground station looked like the aftermath of a nightclub bombing. Steam from burst pipes shrieked forth in ghostly curtains. Splintered monitors swung broken-necked from the ceiling. A sea of shattered glass spread all the way to the tracks, flashing in the hysterical strobe of red emergency lights like an acre-wide disco ball. — Ransom Riggs

USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it. — Zadie Smith

They made me so smooth like porcelain. Inside I was broken glass. Every fragment was piercing me sharp. At every breath, I felt I was imploding. — Sonia Rao

Broadhampton sat like a broken egg at the bottom of a glass bowl. — Maddie Grigg

Even though on the outside we glittered like gold, inside we were almost as black as coal. Sometimes the glitter people saw was only the shattered pieces reflecting among the broken glass. — Tracy Krimmer

I don't know how many busted bones he had, but he felt like a bag full of broken glass when Bren and I went to move him. — Kit Rocha

You go from the north of Laos and then you go across the Mekong, and when the Pathet Lao soldiers fire, you do not think about your family, just yourself only. When you are on the other side, you will not be like what you were before ou get through the Mekong. On the other side you cannot say to your wife, I love you more than my life. She saw! You cannot say that anymore! And when you try to restick this thing together is is like putting glue on a broken glass. — Anne Fadiman

Bent
like the branches of a tree
broken
like the pieces of my heart
cracked
like the seventeenth moon
shattered
like the glass in the window
the day we met — Kami Garcia

Nico's voice was like broken glass. "I- I wasn't in love with Annabeth."
"You were jealous of her," Jason said. "That's why you didn't want to be around her. Especially why you don't want to be around ... him. It makes total sense. — Rick Riordan

The woman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There was a low growling sound and the Munstermobile came gliding up out of the parking garage, dripping water from its gleaming surface like some lantern-eyed leviathan rising from the depths. There were still a few dents and dings in it, but the broken glass had all been replaced, and the engine sounded fine.
Okay, I'm not like a car fanatic or anything - but the guitar riff from "Bad to the Bone" started playing in my head. — Jim Butcher