Quotes About Vulnerability

The human heart was such a complex organ, fragile and sturdy all at once.

if we are aiming to be genuinely self-reliant, we must learn to embrace uncertainty and anxiety. If we fail, there will be nothing to break our fall—nothing but whatever cushion we have managed to create for ourselves.

To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren't expecting to.

To photograph people is to obligate them in some way to face things they weren't expecting to. You take them off their path, away from their plans, from their everyday routine. Sometimes it's also forcing them to die.

Tell me that you don't take that blade and drag it across your skin and pray for the courage to press down.

In a strange way we were free. We'd reached the end of the line. We had nothing more to lose. Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: all of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves

I cannot keep to the point. Perhaps I am afraid. It is not easy for me to admit that. My courage is one of the few things about myself that I do not doubt. It is one of the things in which I believe . . . But I would be crazy not to be afraid now.

Afraid, now that I knew what I wanted. What I did not want. I did not want him to hurt me.

I suddenly wondered if he thought that I was powerless, and then I realized that I was powerless.

I said nothing, fearful that he would stop.

It has been my experience that when two people talk about sex, sex in the abstract, if there is such a thing, it is a way of fucking before you get into bed, trying it out, seeing if it's going to work.

He resisted for a moment, laughing, nudging aside my head with his hip, and then with a heavy sigh, as if I were leading him to his doom, he leaned back on the bed, elbows bent, and watched me.

and with a low moan he entered me with such ease, such presumption, that I began to come the moment he was inside of me.

They make these confessions to me in a shyly flirtatious way, as if they were trying to seduce me.

I didn't think I seemed like the sort of person who would mind." "What?" "I'd have fucked you anyway." . . . "I thought I'd lose you," he said at last. "Have you ever told me the truth?" "Look—" he paused. "People lie to me all day long. And I lie to them all day long. I've done it all my life.

Sometimes when I am not expecting it, when I let down my guard for a moment, allowing the thousands, the millions of little synapses in my head to work their will, conveying to me just what it is that I cannot bear to know, cannot bear to be known, I do remember.

I don't care what you do," Malloy said to me, "you can do anything you want, but if you ever tell anyone I eat frozen diet dinners, I'll kill you.

Unshed tears leave a deposit on your heart. Eventually they form a crust around it and paralyze it, the way mineral deposits paralyze a washing machine.

Somebody called me a 'bruised romantic' once, and I like that.

I cannot even earn a living as a whore.

I'm as vulnerable as anybody to the toxicity of the American nuclear family. But I wouldn't call it disease or moral failure as much as I would point the finger at a system that grinds people down like a metal file. Who doesn't need a drink? Who isn't going to crack and lash out at the people they love?

Sex is one of the few honest places inside us; it doesn't know how to lie, even if we change the story for the public.

For a baby to thrive she or he has to be more than fed and kept clean. She or he needs to be held and to be engaged with as a living baby. This last thought might sound a bit mad. Of course a baby is alive. But if a baby receives only perfunctory care, if her or his needs for food and water and changing are met in a production-line manner, as happened for the many abandoned babies in the Romanian orphanes after Ceausescu was toppled, she or he may not thrive; she may die.

No one knows if he or she or anyone in his or her life will be here in the next five minutes. Don't hold back on expressing yourself. Tell that special person today how you feel, give a hug, cast a smile instead of a frown, and don't forget to tell those you love that you love them.