Trust is like a china plate. If you break it once, with some care and attention you can put it back together again. But if you break it again, it splits into even more pieces and it takes far longer to piece together again. If you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to the point where it’s impossible to restore. There are too many broken pieces, and too much dust.

The truth was a mirror in the hands of God. It fell, and broke into pieces. Everybody took a piece of it, and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.

When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. You can’t purchase trust wholesale. You can’t download trust and store it in a database or warehouse it. You can’t simply duplicate someone’s else’s trust. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). Since we prefer to deal with someone we can trust, we will often pay a premium for that privilege. We call that branding. Brand companies can command higher prices for similar products and services from companies without brands because they are trusted for what they promise. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

Without trust, communication breaks. Here’s why: In any human interaction the required amount of community is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

Maybe you should trust the missed connections, the calls gone unanswered, the opportunities that had every reason to work out but didn’t. Maybe you should trust in the small signs before they become big ones. Maybe you should trust those tiny contractions, the nights that exhaust you and the people who don’t see you and the places that make you feel that subtle uneasiness. Maybe you should learn to trust in what passes you by so you’ll begin to trust in what lands right in front of you. Maybe you should trust that in what isn’t working, because it might be trying to guide you to what will.

And that’s what trust is. We don’t just trust people to obey the rules, we also trust that they know when to break them.

It could <i>always</i> all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.

It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.

There are some things in this world you rely on, like a sure bet. And when they let you down, shifting from where you've carefully placed them, it shakes your faith, right where you stand.

if you have been assaulted by somebody you thought you could trust, how do you restore your sense of trust in the world or in people? And how do you trust yourself?

Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There’s a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.

Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes, But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim.

There is cracks, cracks, in everything, that's how the light gets in.' I had cracks but not the hope.

Our ability to trust in institutions and in one another — the ability to trust that we are subject to the same facts, even living in the same reality — is now endangered. A combination of causes has brought us to this point, a crisis of trust that has the potential to be paralyzing.