Quotes About Vulnerability

Despite myself, I could feel my eyes filling with tears and I turned my head so that she couldn't see my face. Isabella turned off the light on the bedside table and stayed there, sitting close to me in the dark, listening to the weeping of a miserable drunk, asking no questions, offering no opinion, offering nothing other than her company and her kindness, until I fell asleep.

Sabe o que têm de melhor os corações despedaçados? - perguntou a bibliotecária. Fiz-lhe um sinal negativo. -Só se podem despedaçar uma vez. Tudo o resto são arranhões.

I looked at him and saw a lonely man, devoid of hope. I knew what I was doing when I took him home and let myself be seduced by him. I knew I was deceiving him and that he knew, too, but had nothing else in the world. That is how we became lovers, out of desperation.

Do you know the best thing about broken hearts?" the librarian asked. I shook my head. "They can only really break once. The rest is just scratches.

Despi-a á luz de uma vela.Tirei-lhe os sapatos,impregnados de água empoçada,o vestido ensopado e as meias rasgadas.Enxuguei-lhe o corpo e o cabelo com uma toalha lavada.Ainda tremia de frio quando a deitei na cama e me estendi ao seu lado,abraçando-a para a aquecer.Ficámos assim durante muito tempo,em silêncio,a ouvir a chuva.Lentamente senti que o corpo amornava sob as minhas mãos e a respiração começava a tornar-se profunda.

With women the best part is the discovery. There's nothing like the first time, nothing. You don't know what life is until you undress a woman the first time. A button at a time, like peeling a hot, sweet potato on a winter's night.

Well then, since we're playing at telling the truth, let me tell you that you're always going to be alone. You'll be alone because you don't know how to love or how to share. You're like this house. It makes my hair stand on end. I'm not surprised your lady in white left you or that everyone else has too. You don't love and you don't allow yourself to be loved. p269

We curl up in bed together, without a blanket. She wraps me in her arms like a teddy bear, the way she always does, and falls asleep against my forehead. My hand is squished against her belly, probably pressing into the clouds of the tiny world inside of her.

You're brave one minute, skittish the next. You need to be gentled, to learn that the hand that's stroking you can be trusted.

Because what he wanted was more than her body. He wanted her soul. And she was clearly nowhere near ready to give it to him. His phone rang, and

And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue

I'll practice the new me in front of guests. I kind of like some of them, the guests. One has a soft, soft voice but I'm afraid he, too, may be practicing his new personality on me and that maybe he has trained himself with electric shock to his balls or some other place just as tender and soft, so that we are both living a lie.

I draw on the work of Piaget (1968) in identifying conflict as the harbinger of growth and also on the work of Erikson (1964) who, in charting development through crisis, demonstrates how a heightened vulnerability signals the emergence of a potential strength, creating a dangerous opportunity for growth, a turning point for better or worse (p. 139).

I was the breakable one. Women always are. It's not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It's more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other. After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you're drowning.

It's like concentrating on your own breath: once you start thinking about the air rushing in and out of your body, your breath has a way of getting stuck in your throat so that you understand how easy it would be to fall down and die.

Beauty takes courage. Courage itself takes courage.

I remember that I did feel, starting my mini-tour, the resident anxiety you develop when you know you've been too lucky; at any moment, maybe next Tuesday afternoon, I would be stricken with something unbearable.

It's the people who almost decide to live in glass houses who throw the first stones.

Please, stop this. Leave me alone,' she begged, despising herself for her weakness. 'Oh, please, Leon, leave me alone!' The last came out as a choked sob. He stood up and came to stand in front of her. 'I can't, my cool Helen. You have me tied up in knots. If it's time you want, you've got it, but you have to let me see you, be with you, talk to you.' -Leon & Helen

The most crippling part of my personality is that as much as I want to know something, I can't bear admitting I'm ignorant. It's as if I think I should have been born knowing and understanding all. As if when I say out loud, what are you talking about? the world will point and jeer.

Girls wanted girls to have boyfriends, but they also wanted to tease, find any raw nerves that might be exposed, and expose them more.

beaten up, raped, murdered, arsonised—if there was such a word—yet the confidence of the human race that they, their loved ones and acquaintances had personally been granted divine immunity was uncrackable.

Living in harmony with truth means you are not harboring secrets or hiding behind old wounds, not betraying yourself or others.

John O'Donohue talks about the Buddhist tradition of the kalyana-mitra, or "noble friend." Your noble friend, he says, "will not accept pretension but will gently and very firmly confront you with your own blindness. No one can see life totally. As there is a blind spot in the retina of the human eye, there is also in the soul a blind side where you are not able to see. Therefore you must depend on the one you love to see for you what you cannot see yourself.