Quotes about Vulnerability

If we were going to die would you tell me? I dont know. We're not going to die.

In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.

They'd put an awning up over the gravesite but the weather was all sideways and it did no good.

Here beyond men's judgements all covenants were brittle.

The frailty of everything revealed at last.

The old man lay dim and bleared in his brass bed. Suttree leaned back in the chair and pushed at his eyes with the back of his hand. The day had grown dusk, the rain eased. Pigeons flapped up overhead and preened and crooned. The keeper of this brief vigil said that he'd guessed something of the workings in the wings, the ropes and sand-bags and the houselight toggles. Heard dimly a shuffling and coughing beyond the painted drop of the world.

People dont feel safe no more, he said. We're like the Comanches was two hundred years ago. We dont know what's goin to show up here come daylight. We dont even know what color they'll be.

Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.... And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.

She felt unpeeled and rather exposed. She felt almost improper.

The shame, the roused feeling of exposure acted on his brain, made him heavy, unutterably heavy.

My God, these folks don't know how to love -- that's why they love so easily.

Don't talk any more, she pleaded softly, laying her hand on his forehead. He lay quite still, almost unable to move. His body was somewhere discarded. Why not - are you tired? Yes, and it wears you out. He laughed shortly, realising. Yet you always make me like it, he said.