Quotes About Vulnerability

The power paradox is this: we rise in power and make a difference in the world due to what is best about human nature, but we fall from power due to what is worst. We gain a capacity to make a difference in the world by enhancing the lives of others, but the very experience of having power and privilege leads us to behave, in our worst moments, like impulsive, out-of-control sociopaths.

It isn't just dictators, power-mad politicians, kings of high finance, and drug-addled rock stars who are vulnerable to abuses of power; the power paradox can undermine the social life of any of us at any moment. Whether we are at work, out with friends, in encounters with strangers, or with our children, the very skills that enable us to gain respect and esteem are corrupted when we are feeling powerful.

The heart is what is important. There is nothing more vulnerable, nothing more corruptible than the human mind; nor is there anything as powerful, steadfast and ennobling.

Such was the paradox of love: out of fear of losing it, you willingly relinquished it. You inflicted upon yourself the wound you dreaded most of all.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real?

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.

I needed her to stop. Needed not to hear the pain in her voice--to see the way she was twisting the pocketbook strap. If she kept talking, she might break down and tell me everything.

If you risked love, it took you wherever you wanted to go. If you repressed it, you ended up unhappy.

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness, the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. There's nothing to writing, the columnist Red Smith once commented. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

what are out stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

Audry Hepburn on the cover of The Nun's Story was staring up at me from my unmade bed. Her hair was hidden by her snow-white wimple; her big eyes looked frightened. What are you looking at? I said. Fuck you. It was the first time I'd ever said the word. I felt a brief shiver of power. Then I sat back on the bed and sobbed. Dolores Price: Lady of Sorrow.

As my father talked, tears dripped down the side of his face like candle wax. The sight shocked me; until that moment, I had assumed men were as incapable of crying as they were of having babies.

And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.

People are not like Tupperware, with their lids on securely.

She usually shooed me out when I caught her naked, but Daddy's anger had left her far away and careless. The ashtray sat on the edge of the tub, filled with stubbed-out Pall Malls; the bathroom was thick with smoke that moved when I moved.

For five minutes, neither of us spoke. I stared ahead and watched the seat upholstery go blurry from my tears.

She flinched when I did it, and that involuntary response of hers satisfied me in some small, cheap way. I never claimed I was lovable. Never said I wasn't a son of a bitch.

I'm not supposed to need fixing; I'm the strong one—the lookout.

If I talked, I might cry.

All the dead bolts and pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

Love was always the thing that did that-smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

He was as kind and slow with me as he'd been that first summer and I pushed away all my anger and hurt and distrust because he owed me love.

thought about how love was always the thing that did that—smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt. .