Quotes About Vulnerability

It's a hard thing to explain, but in some ways if you're broken, you're always broken. In some ways. It's like the difference between a china mug that's lying in pieces on your floor or one that's been carefully glued back together: it might not look as pretty as a brand-new one, and you might have to be a little more careful with it, but at least you can drink out of it. It works.

We're kids. People keep stuff from kids. They think we're supposed to stay all pure or something until we grow up, and nothing should upset us. So they whisper about bad stuff behind our backs so we don't get upset. But it's so totally useless, because then at the same time they're always doing stuff that's really upsetting.

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.

Also, I should note that in my opinion, we're all wounded humans. The rest is just a matter of degree.

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.

A human life is a very different place when you can tell people what you need.

Even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn't being naked, not really. It's just showing skin.

Koschei, Koschei," she whispered. "What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one; I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you.

I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.

For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength. Neither do they know reason or restraint, and if you want to know the truth, a goodly number of grown-up hearts never learn it.

Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.

To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.

I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole. I could wait for you in the dark. I could howl against your hair.

He'll burn you down like wax if you let him. You'll think it's love, while he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be. But he's so hungry, he'll eat you all in one sitting, and you'll be in his belly, and what will you do then?

I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love.

When I saw him I thought I could curl up inside him and go to sleep and never wake up." "Men are no good for that, Masha. They'll always want you working, when you're not softening their fall into bed at the end of the day.

her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.

Of late, she had felt coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.

Finally, she said: "I'm lonely" — it's weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can't help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you're confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: "I'm lonely," and they ate her in the street.

Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs.

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror.

Why should I care about you first kiss,' he said. 'You can kiss anyone you like. But sometimes if you wanted to kiss me, that would be all right, too.

Well enough. I won't ask you if your love is true or any of that rot—it's not my place to judge. After all, I'm a naked woman chained to a wall; I've no business questioning the lifestyles of wine-makers or anyone else.

Love, I've never been anyone's mother; I don't know how to talk to young or old. But don't stop smiling just because I flap my mouth and say something that's not dressed around the edges like a lace tablecloth. Thicken up and we'll get along fine.