The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership

“The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”

“he patiently tolerated as much of him as he thought tolerable. The rest he ignored.”

“She cared for him without hope, because she had passed the place of turning back or looking back. Quietly, almost submissively, she propped herself against him, because in her fate and faith she was opposed to his ruin.”

“How many times in the last twenty years has Wheeler risen to speak, to realize that the speech he has prepared is a defense of the dead and the absent, and he is pleading with strangers for a hope that, he is afraid, has no chance?”

“He has never learned anything until he has had to—as he willingly says, as perhaps is so—but he has had to learn a good deal.”

“The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." Burley Coulter”