Quotes About Vulnerability

No one ever fell in love gracefully.

I want you cool and regal, earthy and impertinent, spoiling for a fight and abashed at your own temper. I want you flushed with exertion and rosy with sleep. I want you teasing and provocative, somber and thoughtful. I want every emotion, every mood, every year in a lifetime to come. I want you beside me, to encourage and argue with me, to help me and let me help you. I want to be your champion and lover, your mentor and student.

Love shouldn't be comfortable.

Come on, Avery. Fresh tears stained her cheeks. Her voice shook. Wake up, damn it! She sobbed, rocking forward and back, her arms wrapping tightly around his big body. Don't you want to shout at me for disobeying you, you overbearing, domineering male? She squeezed her eyes shut and bit hard on her lip. He couldn't die. He was too stubborn, too alive, too vigorous. And she couldn't lose him. She loved him too much. I… am a… gentleman, she heard him gasp. I never shout at women.

Tears are nothing to be ashamed of at all. -Grandma Shaw

I watched as she stretched over the board to flick off a fallen leaf. Underneath her thin cotton shell, I saw how fragile the bones in her back were, far too sliver-prone, far too light to support a pair of wings.

When feelings get so string they're woven into my bones, I can't talk about them without crying.

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer." —ANTHONY TROLLOPE, The Bertrams But

Nothing can save you, not youth or beauty or wealth, not intelligence or power or courage. You are all alone, in the middle of the ocean, with the lights going out.

The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn't know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren't.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

Somewhere in the world is the most invincible man. Just as somewhere is the most vulnerable.

That the boy was all that stood between him and death.

A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body

Love makes men foolish. I speak as a victim myself. We are taken out of our own care and then it remains to be seen only if fate will show to us some share of mercy. Or little. Or none.

They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held the boy close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart.

In the spring of the year birds began to arrive on the beach from across the gulf. Weary passerines. Vireos. Kingbirds and grosbeaks. Too exhausted to move. You could pick them up out of the sand and hold them trembling in your palm. Their small hearts beating and their eyes shuttering. He walked the beach with his flashlight the whole of the night to fend away predators and toward the dawn he slept with them in the sand. That none disturb these passengers.

If I didnt have her I dont know what I would have. Well, yes I do. You wouldnt need a box to put it in, neither.

Nothing. Where all was burnt to ash before them no fires were to be had and the nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they'd yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life. He held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in the blackness.

The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.

The boy's candlecolored skin was all but translucent.

The boy was sitting quietly on the bunk, still wrapped in the blanket, watching. The man thought he had probably not fully committed himself to any of this. You could wake in the dark wet woods at any time.

It is always one's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it.

The more noise you make the more likely you are to be eaten. If you've no way to escape you keep silent. If birds couldnt fly they wouldnt sing. When you're defenseless you keep your opinions to yourself.