Quotes About Vulnerability

One would hope, as well that intimacy would leave more of a mark, that more of it would remain. But it doesn't. You just end up thinking, who is this person?

The emotions I feel are no more meant to be shown in their unadulterated state than the inner organs by which we live.

I was like some daft child who burns himself once and after that is willing to shiver in the darkness rather than make a fire.

Wir leben in einem Haus, das ständig zusammenzubrechen droht, und können nicht viel mehr unternehmen, als hier einen Balken abzustützen und dort das Dach zu flicken, damit es nicht hineinregnet. Wenn du dann morgens durch die Stube gehst, brichst du schon wieder durch die Dielen.

Und während ich dich so anschaute, entdeckte ich all die wunderbaren Unvollkommenheiten an dir, deren unzählbare Menge die Menschen insgesamt und dich im besonderen ebenso liebebedürftig wie liebenswert und so einzigartig machen.

Allow me someday to touch you.The way that you've all touched me.

Hope can be the most wonderful thing in the world or it can crush your heart like an eggshell.

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world's scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman's scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, 'No, the scariest noise is, you're all alone in your dark house, you know you're all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles—and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush.

Sure, on a larger scale, it was healthy to have people out there you cared about more than yourself. She knew that. But then there was the abject fear you would lose it. They say possessions own you. Not so. Loved ones own you. You are forever held hostage once you care so much.

He was a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. When we played, his child's heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed and mothers and fathers were dim and far away--too far away to ever reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal--would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard.

Regardless of what your Achilles Heel may be, loving yourself with a balance of acceptance and self-discipline is a key to achieving mastery. You have to appreciate yourself as you are, including your weak spots and vulnerabilities, as a basis for lasting change.

To make peace with yourself, you may have to give up a lot. You may have to give up feeling sorry for yourself, straining to be someone you are not, hiding the parts of yourself you fear are unacceptable, and worrying about what others think.

To admit the presence of fear isn't weakness. Only a fool would pretend that he is never fearful.

To be fully and authentically human, we have to be prepared to take off the armor we usually go around wearing to keep the world from hurting us. We have to be prepared to accept pain, or else we will never dare to hope or to love

I don't think we don't love each other.

One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.

Prostitutes (especially when they come from the underclass)—along with street hustlers, teenage runaways, vagrants, junkies, and other social outcasts—are what criminologists call "targets of opportunity": people who are especially vulnerable to serial homicide because they are easy to snare and overpower and are so marginalized that no one, including members of the police and the press, pays much attention when they go missing.

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.

If you are an approval addict, your behaviour is as easy to control as that of any other junkie. All a manipulator need do is a simple two-step process: Give you what you crave, and then threaten to take it away. Every drug dealer in the world plays this game.

He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenceless child,—like

But what needs tell the story, told too oft,—every day told,—of heart-strings rent and broken,—the weak broken and torn for the profit and convenience of the strong! It needs not to be told;—every day is telling it,—telling it, too, in the ear of One who is not deaf, though he be long silent.

I'm not going to tell you how I think you should live your life, or what I think you should do," said Mary. "Now's not the time. But I will say this: Don't try to paper over things that matter, Laura. The cracks will appear. Maybe not immediately, but they will.