Quotes About Vulnerability

Our culture generally views tears and what may lie behind them—sadness, anger, disappointment, fear—as signs of a problem. Something has gone wrong. Somebody needs to figure out who screwed up so we can set this thing right. But tears are actually sweet things. They are signs of authentic feelings. Of

real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world

When you are filled with fear, anxiety, or other difficult emotions, the first thing you should always do is make friends with them.

To enter a relationship for the long term is to enter the space of not knowing. While this is so brave and beautiful, exhilarating even, it is not particularly comfortable.

brilliant life is not about being untouched by sorrow but has more to do with relaxing and allowing the world to touch you. It's way braver to open yourself to the world than to wall yourself off from it.

if you try to prevent strong emotion, you're always on the defensive. If you never put up your guard in the first place, you have nothing to defend and therefore nothing to worry about.

most pressing questions: Who am I? What am I doing with my life? How can what I most desire (love) be also what is most treacherous? Losing love re-focuses all of your attention away from intellectual, physical, or professional concerns and places it instead on love itself, to beg perhaps the most critical question of all: How can I permit myself to love when the possibility of loss cannot be denied? These now become the most important questions in the world and they demand exploration.

It starts with the realization that a broken heart is nothing to be ashamed of. It is an altered state, an experience of sacred openness.

real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world … If a person does not feel alone and sad, he cannot be a [spiritual] warrior at all…

As I move to help him I glanced back at my boy, the singer of bees, as he sat in a patch of sun. This is a Sacred Being, I thought, in hushed wonder. Tears sprang forward and I blinked them away. I was not proud, you see, or very glad. I was afraid for him from that day on because while this world has a great need of Sacred Beings, we are never ready for them.

The more established we are in our world, the less flexibility we have for allowing a partner into that world.

Sex is one of the arenas where a person is most themselves, and reveals that self most early and openly in a relationship

In truth I am changed by the event, and not for the better. Seeing how easily I can be physically overpowered has sapped a great deal of my fighting spirit. In the wake of this violation of my home and my person I experience an unfamiliar emotion: fear. I perceive fear rushes into the spaces left when confidence flees, when a woman realizes she is no longer a person of any particular importance or authority, as she had long been allowed to believe.

If you are open, vulnerable, disclosing, more likely than not it will be reciprocated and walls will come down.

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Having him hold me like that was the only good thing out of it all, having him hold me and being right there with me. I just wished he could have held me harder and tighter and made the bad feelings, the dirty feelings, go away. But I don't think you can hold a person that tight, so tight that she's in your heart, way inside your skin, being cleaned and warmed by your blood. (11)

I sobbed for the girl, me, the other girl, the other me, and how he was hurting her - me..."the other girl," I said to her. "It's the other girl, Caroline. Don't let her be alone." (154)

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.

To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.

Maybe that's what love was -- walking willingly into the unknown for the sake of the other.

At this stage of life, he'd better just lean into love, because if he fell, he feared he might break a hip.

The time for falling in love was when you were emotionally available and free of cares, when it didn't matter what time you came home or how late you were getting up the next day. When you had hours and hours to spend gazing into each other's eyes and even longer hours making love, uninterrupted. If you wait for the perfect time to fall in love…it'll never happen.