Quotes About Vulnerability

Please, God. I am a smart woman, I know words, I've read books; he's just a guy, he's just a person, I can speak to him. "Hmm," I say, and during the subsequent silence, I consider ways to kill myself.

When you get old, everyone wants to protect you," Rosie says to me. "They don't remember that if you managed to et this old, you've probably figured out how to protect yourself.

Kathleen Gilles Seidel

When I want to know a thing, I resort to books and feel strangely exposed without books to fall back on, as though standing on a ledge.

We look about the world, by the light we have made, and realise it's all vulnerable, and all worth saving, and no one can do it but us.

If tears proved him still human, a touch would prove him not.

Three things come to mind as we look at this text: (1) we are theological amnesiacs; (2) the psalmist reminds us that God really is in charge; and (3) only when we feel weak and helpless, whether young or old, are we vulnerable enough to experience the power and grace of a God who "raises us up on eagle's wings." So, this text is about us, about God and what God does with us when all we seem to be is down.

Being closed in makes us edgy because it reminds us of our vulnerability before the elements; we can't escape the fact that life is precarious.

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

And she knew that no matter how fast she moved, she could not reach her mother quickly enough, and the doctor would be too slow, and tomorrow would be terrible in a way that would make her long for the security of all her old dissatisfactions.

Despite her promise to share every secret, Clara didn't tell Daphne about her faulty heart. It was too gratifying to be recognized for her strength. Clara wanted to be the person that Daphne saw.

A newborn is murderous/but can't do anything about it.

We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.

There is not one part of me that won't shrink and die without you. There is not one moment when I will not regret the very air I breathe. I am inadequate, a complete failure in the very task of loving and yet I love you. I love you. Badly. Stupidly. As clumsily and as greedily and as hopelessly as a child. And I would not, for all the world, have you believe otherwise. I am broken.

After all, if I started confiding my innermost problems to someone, I'd have to do something about them. And I'm not ready for that yet.

Think of them like gods, Janice said, because that's what they are. The nape of a human neck is especially easy to see through – that's why they love it when we bow our heads. It doesn't have anything to do with praying. Prayers bore them.

If you're a bee or an ant, you love sweetness. Sweet sweet sweet, the world says to you, I am sweet, and then, often as not, a human hand comes down like the shadow of the world and that is that.

Had the Ellwood plan passed, perhaps her downward spiral into $2-a-day poverty, and her repeated spells of homelessness, could have been avoided. No one will ever know for sure.

And now you'll never be able to have anyone else, because you won't be able to keep our secret. You'll tell whoever it is, and once he knows, he'll leave you.

The little girl's eyes were squeezed tightly shut and she bore the angry expression unique to babies who had just been wrenched from the sanctuary of warmth and nourishment where they had spent the previous nine blissful months.

If the experiences of such countries are any guide, the replacement of a formal economy with an informal one—unregulated and unpoliced—may have a self-perpetuating effect of pushing the $2-a-day poor further and further out of the American mainstream.

People in love always make fools of themselves.

True love takes courage, because you have to offer yourself, everything you are, weaknesses and all. And that is the greatest fear of all because rejection of self from someone you love would be a pain beyond enduring.

I wasn't very good at the bike thing. Really, it was just dangerous to trust two skinny little wheels and spindly brakes with the considerably uncoordinated woman that is me.