Franz Grillparzer Quotes

Your home is regarded as a model home, your life as a model life. But all this splendor, and you along with it... it's just as though it were built upon a shifting quagmire. A moment may come, a word can be spoken, and both you and all this splendor will collapse.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

Destiny is a tower of cards - nudge one just an inch and everything stacked on top comes crashing down. P116

It was all too easy to make things up, it was like skating on thin ice, it was like doing dainty pirouettes on a brittle crust over water thousands of fathoms deep.

A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking-it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.

His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

It is painful to doubt the sincerity of those we love.

Travelers never did lie, though fools at home condemn them.

There is no way of knowing for sure whether or not you can trust someone, for the simple reason that circumstances change all of the time.

The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you.

Just because you have a good hand today doesn't mean it's good tomorrow. And some of the things we're doing may become very disadvantageous at some point.

It's not always so simple, Haven. Sometimes there isn't a good guy and a bad guy. Sometimes even the ones you want to believe turn out to be liars.

I shouldn't believe anything I say, if I were you-and that includes what I just told you.

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true and assured I have gotten either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.

Amy: "Can I come?" Doctor: "Not safe in here, not yet. Five minutes. Give me five minutes and I'll be right back." Amy: "People always say that." Doctor: "Am I people?...Do I even look like people?...Trust me, I'm the Doctor.

When you want to know how things really work, study them when they're coming apart.

William James once said: "Progress is a terrible thing." It is more than that: it is also a highly ambiguous notion. For who knowsbut that a little further on the way a bridge may not have collapsed or a crevice split the earth?

What Roman power slowly built, an unarmed traitor instantly overthrew.

To be honest," I halfwhispered, "I don't feel as safe with him as I do with you." "I know." A ghost of a smile touched my lips. "How do you know?" "Think about what safety is, Ella." "Trust?" "Yes, partly. But also an absence of risk." He unstuck a strand of hair from my damp cheek and tucked it back. "Maybe you need to take a risk. Maybe you need to be with someone who rattles you a little.

Life is a walk in the fog. Most people don't know that. They're fooled by the sunlight into thinking they can see what's ahead. But it's the reason they are forever getting lost or falling into ditches or committing matrimony.

Adolescents are travelers, far from home with no native land, neither children nor adults. They are jet-setters who fly from one country to another with amazing speed. Sometimes they are four years old, an hour later they are twenty-five. They don't really fit anywhere. There's a yearning for place, a search for solid ground.

Where are we going? You never told me." "My home in Romania." Wow, this guy wasn’t kidding with his Dracula fixation.

Though he love not to buy the pig in the poke.

He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.