Quotes About Vulnerability

We've got to live them out in our bodies too. Yours. Mine. Droopy and ugly and fat and thin and marred and wretched as they are. We have to be as fearless about our bellies as we are with our hearts.

She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.

A proclamation of love is not inherently "loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.

The only thing I ever hope to do as a writer is to make people feel less alone, to make them feel more human, to make them feel what I have felt so many times as a reader: stories have the power to save us by illuminating the most profoundly beautiful and terrible things about our existence.

He said, "Don't get me wrong. I want to hear everything about your life. But I want you to know that you don't need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don't have to be broken for me.

Practice saying the word "love" to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

You're generally less humble in that decade than you'll ever be and this lack of humility is oddly mixed with insecurity and uncertainty and fear.

It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we're brave enough to touch the rawesr, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without paues and see - thrillingly, terrifyingly - that it was never her we had to fear. It war always only us.

If you take that risk, if you take that chance, if you tell the truest, hardest, deepest story you have within you, you're not going to step into the light and find that you're there alone. That you're going to be surrounded by people who are there with you.

It will also be a little bit scary, the way it always is when we're brave enough to touch the rawest, realest truths. When we have the guts to look directly into the mirror and say Mary Worth thirteen times without pause and see—thrillingly, terrifyingly—that it was never her we had to fear. It was always only us.

You aren't afraid of love. You're afraid of all the junk you've yoked to love. And you've convinced yourself that withholding one tiny word from the woman you think you love will shield you from that junk.

I got you," my friend the writer and teacher Jen Pastiloff says so often she has it tattooed on her arm. That's what this vespers thing felt like to me, Spent. Like someone had me. Like for the tiniest glimmer of a moment I was held by a force more powerful than the force I could muster on my own.

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there.

Our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at one point or another. You're in a pickle. You did things you didn't hope to do. You have not always been your

How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.

enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

love" comes loaded with promises and commitments that are highly fragile and easily broken.

Each and every one of those people rose at a moment in their lives - one that is very much like this moment in your life, "suffocated" and at that moment they chose to tell the truth about themselves instead of staying "safe" inside the lie.

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel.

She'd kept the secret sealed so tightly inside her for so long it could not be extracted without altering who she was, she realized now. The secret was not separate from her. In the telling of it, she'd come undone.

Honest to Jeez, Loafer, if your skin got any thinner, your guts'd pop out and dance a hula.

So what's been happening to you?" his friend asked. "You have insomnia, you're off your feed, and you couldn't get it up a couple of times. So what?" He shook his head, laughing again. "I really don't think that if you went to a doctor and described those symptoms, he would shake his head and say"—and Jerry's voice shifted into a very bad imitation of Bela Lugosi's—" 'We are dealing here with the curse of the Undead!

How did I wind up with Reese? Maybe because I'd had a lot of guys who were all talk and nothing beyond. You know—if some junkie tried to knife us in a movie theater, my boyfriend would try to talk it over with the guy. Civilized behavior. And I'd be lying there with my trachea in my lap.

That's what human relationships are about – selective sharing and hiding of information to the point of crazy confusion.