Trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it's broken, but you can still see the crack in that mother fucker's reflection.

When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.

Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole.

For trust not him that hath once broken faith

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

Relationships never break cleanly. Like a valuable vase, they are smashed and then glued back together, smashed and glued, smashed and glued until the pieces just don’t fit together anymore.

Trust is earned, respect is given, and loyalty is demonstrated. Betrayal of any one of those is to lose all three.

Except that once you had broken up, it was much easier to do so again. He ought to know. How many times had he and Charlotte split? How many times had their relationship fallen to pieces, and how many times had they tried to reassemble the wreckage? There had been more cracks than substance by the end: they had lived in a spider's web of fault lines, held together by hope, pain and delusion.

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.

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.

One act of betrayal can shatter a lifetime of trust.

A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break. So if many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you are counting the days to catastrophe. That’s a single point of failure.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

This is the problem with illusions: They form easy enough, but once they fall apart, they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way.