Quotes About Vulnerability

Today, my heart, like the front door, stands open for the first time in months.

You tell me you didn't sleep well. I say I didn't either. You had a terrible night. "Me too." We're extraordinarily calm and tender with each other as if sensing the other's rickety state of mind. As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don't, of course. We never do. No matter. It's the tenderness I care about. That's the gift this morning that moves and holds me. Same as every morning.

The memory of being that intimate with somebody. We were so intimate I could puke. I can't imagine ever being that intimate with somebody else.

Creo que en el amor no somos más que principiantes. Decimos

Mike, you're not asleep, are you? No, he said. Nothing like that. Well don't go to sleep before me, she said. I don't want to be awake by myself.

The muzzle of the Luger looked like the mouth of the Second Street tunnel, but I didn't move. Not being bullet proof is an idea I had had to get used to.

I looked at her again. She lay still now, her face pale against the pillow, her eyes large and dark and empty as rain barrels in a drought. One of her small five-fingered thumbless hands picked at the cover restlessly. There was a vague glimmer of doubt starting to get born in her somewhere. She didn't know about it yet. It's so hard for women - even nice women - to realise that their bodies are not irresistible.

her face fell apart like a bride's pie crust.

I still held his automatic more or less pointed at him, but he swung on me just the same. It caught me flush on the chin. I backstepped fast enough to keep from falling, but I took plenty of the punch. It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.

Informants can be helpful, but they are never infallible. All tools can break, or be turned into weapons.

You know what they say: 'Men have throats and daggers have sharp edges'.

No matter how canny you think you are, something can come along, bam, and put you on your prat.

Life has shown me all too often it's a fragile gift. Remember, no one gets out of life alive.

a lot of what makes one man a ruler and another not is simply a willingness to be wrong.

The child, who could not have been more than four, kept his eyes fixed upon Nakor, who at last placed his free hand upon the child's face a moment. When he removed it, the child's eyes closed and he slumped against the Isalani's chest. 'He'll sleep. It's better for him. He's too young for such horror.

It's tempting to think of yourself as powerful when those around you are far less so, but compared to the simple fact of existence, to the power of life and how it hangs on, we are nothing.

What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?

You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. All the worst things that happened to other women because they were women could happen to you because you were a woman. Even if you weren't killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence

The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.

Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?

Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because the key in survival is knowing you're lost: they don't stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.

everyone is interdependent. Everyone is vulnerable. Everyone is penetrable, and everyone is penetrated incessantly by the vibrations of sound traveling into the inner ear.

I felt hemmed in, hunted. Over and over women and girls were attacked, not for what they'd done, but because they were at hand when a man wished to. To punish is the word that comes to mind but for what might linger as a question. Not for who, but for what they were, we were. But really for who he was, a man who had the desire and believed he had the right to harm women. To demonstrate that his power was as boundless as her powerlessness.

Like many very poor people and people from countries in turmoil, Nafissatou Diallo had lived in the margins, where telling the truth to authorities is not always a wise or safe thing to do, so she was portrayed as a liar.