precarious existence Quotes

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband’s pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children’s skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.”

“They walk there in just the clothes they stand up in. The war is ending, and there is a precarious existence eking out food stores, and anticipating horrors from the oncoming Russian army.”