Quotes About Vulnerability

Love, he thought. It could make you a fool or a hero. Or both at once.

I don't know if I've got it in me for another important relationship. They're so much damn work. Love can be, should be, so consuming, so demanding. I just don't know that I've got the stamina, or the heart, or the generosity.

When you love with all you are, it isn't unhappiness alone you risk. It's heaven too.

you stepped back, you squared your shoulders, and you showed you were willing to face what life had dealt you. That takes courage, Margo—much more—than leaping into the void. I had people to turn to. So do we all. It's only fools and egotists who think no one will be there to lend a hand. And bigger food and bigger egotists who don't reach out.

Nothing's more powerful than a woman at that instant before she gives herself.

Being a peaceful people isn't the same as being a defenseless one.

That was really good driving, Maddy told her. Yeah, thanks. Here, baby. Here. Pilar turned her, held her when the shakes came. And, holding her, reached out for Maddy. Here, baby, she said again. Maddy pressed herself into that circle of comfort and let the tears come.

Don't say anything. Just let me look at you. He cupped her face, skimmed his hands back into her hair. Her skin was chilled, her eyes huge and full of worry. But she was here, she was whole. Just let me look. I'm fine. He drew her close, seemed to fold himself around her and rock. Sophia?

It's hard to position a movement when the territory is so intimate. Men, after all, can't exactly gather on the White House lawn and demonstrate for their right to cry in public or claim their lost fathers' love. These, it would seem, are matters for the therapist's couch. Private matters.

He told you not to cry, but tears keep leaking out of your eyes. And you're glad, because those tears belong to you. They're yours. Your tears. He can't have them. He can't touch them. They're all yours. (182)

It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.

She was one of the most beautiful dancers I've ever seen. She made her partner feel as if he were about to be left behind, or already had been. It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.

because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they'd never admit in normal conversation. It's a way for people to be honest without telling the truth.

and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like.

Your heart is my piñata.

Make me into anything, but just love me.

You gain power by pretending to be weak.

The most boring thing in the entire world is nudity. The second most boring thing is honesty.

You had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.

More and more, the hardest part of crying is when I can't stop.

There are a lot of things we don't want to know about the people we love.

If it comes down to a choice between being unloved and being vulnerable and sensitive and emotional, then you can just keep your love.

That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It re-creates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we've grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed.

Yes, these are bruises from fighting and I'm okay with that.