Quotes About Vulnerability

fight cancer. (Research has shown that children who suffer abuse are about 50 percent more likely to get cancer than other children.)

powerlessness in a relationship is one of the main causes of stress or anxiety.

I carefully crawled on to the side of his chest, careful not to knock out his tubes, and fell asleep. I could hear the sounds of his body working. The creaky floor sounds from his tummy. The swish of his blood. The pounding of his heart. It sounded like I was swimming and listening to the sounds of water beneath the surface of my father. This was my dad.

Get off your high horse and get yourself grounded! Know what it is like to have your world turned upside down! Your becoming a good therapist is not about putting yourself apart from the people you work with; it is about coming to know intimately their pain, their humiliation, and their ability to rise above it.

It's the anticipation I can't handle. Loss lurks around every corner, and how do we prepare?

It's monstrous. It is too much to take. Why do we even do this—love anybody? Our dumb animal hearts.

We should all be much more careful with each other`s hearts.

See, this is why I was by myself all those years. Because as soon as you let people in, they start depending on you. And then, if you can't be everything they think you should be, you've let them down. It's easier not to have anybody around at all.

We do crazy shit because we're broken.

I'd tell you to be careful, except for two things. One, it wouldn't do any good anyhow. And two, I think we tell each other that too much. Be careful. Don't get hurt. Don't take changes. Don't try anything. Don't feel. Might as well be telling each other not to be alive at all. Boils down to the same thing.

After all, the only thing that hurts more than tears shed is tears unshed.

It's like, if you love somebody. When they hurt you or let you down, you let 'em know you still love them. That's called unconditional love. Anybody can love somebody when they're making you happy. That requires no special talent. That's also how most people do it. But when you get a little wiser, you know you got to love somebody with all their faults. So,

Never be afraid to look, Raymond. It's always better to look. Whatever you're afraid of, turn toward it, not away. Once you're willing to do that, it loses all its power over you. Trust me. I know this. I don't always do it. But I really, truly know.

Maybe when you put tears away uncried, everything you cry about from that day on contains a little of those tears.

trying to model what it means to be a man, but they don't truly know. They think it means be tough, feel nothing, betray nothing. And then Luis comes along and decides that his definition of a man is someone who is not afraid to be kind. That takes courage. Don't you think?

Every now and then my love for that child hit me so hard I felt bowled over. Like a turtle knocked upside down onto its shell, unable to right itself. This was one of those moments.

took her hands away from her face. It was hard to do. She knew she looked a wreck. But if you can't trust a man to look at your real face and not run screaming, what good is it to have him around in the first place?

They reminded her what it meant to allow someone into your life. You see something you like in a man, so you ask him in, but what comes in is all of him. Not only the parts you took a liking to, but the many parts that don't fit with you at all. That's always the way it worked

I'm just a human, among billions of other humans, and I'm alive, and it's really hard being alive, and I don't want to admit it, because nobody around me is admitting it, and most of the time I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm scared.

t's like people who want to feel only happy but not sad," she said. "It never works. You either feel things or you don't. You don't get to pick and choose..

Maybe when you put tears away uncried, everything you cry about from that day on contains a little of those tears. Whether you wanted them released or not.

You see something you like in a man, so you ask him in, but what comes in is all of him. Not only the parts you took a liking to, but the many parts that don't fit with you at all. That's always the way it worked.

She thought about the rifles and the dead animals in the living room, and the vote of no confidence in cats. They reminded her what it meant to allow someone into your life. You see something you like in a man, so you ask him in, but what comes in is all of him. Not only the parts you took a liking to, but the many parts that don't fit with you at all. That's always the way it worked.

decided the situation had thrust me back into a childhood mode—made me feel like a kid again—and in that feeling, there were no tools to climb out of the discomfort, just as there had been no tools when I was young. And