Frayed Quotes

“My vision of the gathered church that had come to me... had been replaced by a vision of the gathered community. What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection. There had maybe never been anybody who had not been loved by somebody, who had been loved by somebody else, and so on and on... It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always preserving a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth. My vision gathered the community as it never has been and never will be gathered in this world of time, for the community must always be marred by members who are indifferent to it or against it, who are nonetheless its members and maybe nonetheless essential to it. And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another's love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.”

“Christmas is a holiday that persecutes the lonely, the frayed, and the rejected.”

“History's got no bows on it, only frayed ends of ribbons and knots that can't be untied.”

“A few blossoms float into the room. They drop like frayed yellow ribbons on the gray carpet.”

“You're not supposed to talk ill of the dead, because how are they supposed to defend themselves? But what if they've done something so bad, so awful that you had to think ill of them? That you needed to.”

“It's frustrating when our best efforts to help people fail. But if we could see life through their weary eyes and experience their trials with the same frayed emotions, we might understand why.”

“My hands trembled, so I took a deep drag to calm my frayed nerves. I just wanted to forget that terrible sight, but questions multiplied in my mind as the smoke furled.”

“How did it die?" he asked."Short circuit," I said. "Old and frayed wires."He looked at me like I was senile."Could have been disease. Violence. Or, sometimes, things die because we don't love them enough.”

“Many a night I woke to the murmer of paper and knew (Dad) was up, sitting in the kitchen with frayed King James - oh, but he worked that book; he held to it like a rope ladder.”