Quotes About Vulnerability

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.

He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn't look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can't grow up. They can get older, but they can't grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won't hit love in the face.

I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you've learned, forget them. Forget that you've been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.

I was hungry, but I was nervous too. You were so new and I didn't want to frighten you away. I didn't want to frighten myself away.

I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me.

I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips.

For the first time in months I felt my body slacken. I had been carrying myself like a gun, cocked, alert, ready for trouble, fearing it.

I would be tender as the night that covers up your foolishness and mine.

My dear, you are in danger of being burned by your own flame.

I want to hold this moment. I want to believe it. I want his love to have enough salt in it to float me. I don't want to be swimming for my life.

The hard-bound space hides the vulnerable self.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

I had thought about everything carefully before I had agreed to him. I had made every preparation, every calculation, except for those two essentials that could not be calculated; his heart and mine.

Mrs. Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.

When I met you I was moving like a blind arrow shot in time of need. I was flint-sharp, flint-primitive. I was aim, arrow, and target. I wanted to be wounded again. I did not want to seal myself against life. I would rather be cut than dry.

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top with the phone saying 'Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine.' The trunks shudder

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

And I notice too often that the most unfeeling of people relieve their shuttered hearts by cooing over babies, who when grown , will be the same people exploited or ignored.

If someone liked me, I waited until she was off guard, and then I told her I didn't want to be her friend any more. I watched the confusion and upset. The tears. Then I ran off, triumphantly in control, and very fast the triumph and the control leaked away, and then I cried and cried, because I had put myself on the outside again, on the doorstep again, where I didn't want to be.

I wanted clothes about me because I felt I had been bone stripped. The solid knowable shape had gone.

Babies are frightening -- raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body.

love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down

We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love too much. And still we long to feel.

I am desperately looking the other way so that love won't see me.