Quotes About Vulnerability

Our heart is a treasury; if you spend all its wealth at once you are ruined. We find it as difficult to forgive a person for displaying his feeling in all its nakedness as we do to forgive a man for being penniless.

Perhaps it is only human nature to inflict suffering on anything that will endure suffering, whether by reason of its genuine humility, or indifference, or sheer helplessness.

Women themselves are so happy, and so beautiful, when they're strong, that they naturally choose powerful men, even if that power's so enermous there's a real risk it could shatter them.

El sentimiento que el hombre soporta más difícilmente es la compasión, sobre todo cuando la merece. El odio es un tónico, hace vivir, inspira la venganza; pero la compasión mata, debilita aun nuestra flaqueza. Es el mal hecho embelesador, es el desprecio en la ternura o la ternura en la ofensa.

A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them.

If you weren't scared, you wouldn't be human, you wouldn't be brave. What do you mean? I ask. If you were fearless, you wouldn't need to overcome it. Bravery means being scared and going forward anyway, Fia says. That's courage

Shame, however, was what I felt seeping through me as though it stained my white bones black.

Like young fern shoots my child's fingers curled. I did not expect, in the fifth month, frost.

Moartea vine pe neasteptate, iar viata e fragila si scurta. Nimeni nu poate sa schimbe asta, nici prin rugaciuni, nici prin vraji.

Once you realize others know, you may be tempted to withdraw from society, suddenly feeling too exposed and vulnerable to others' criticism and stares.

You could jump so much higher when you had somewhere safe to fall.

You could try as hard as you could to imagine someone else's tragedy—drowning in icy waters, living in a city split by a wall—but nothing truly hurts until it happens to you. Most of all, to your child.

First kisses didn't necessarily require darkness and alcohol, they could happen in the open air, with the sun warm on your face and everything around you honest and real and true.

So now I just assume that it won't work, and that if it does work, I'll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn't, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I'm never aware of the hope until it's gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another "I'm sorry.

Elderly women were as tough as nails but it seemed that men got softer as they aged; their emotions caught them off guard, as if some protective barrier had been worn away by time.

Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you're starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it.

But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It's pathetic.

It would be so much easier to be aggressive if she were wearing her bra.

It was strange, because she always felt that she hid herself from Erika, that she was more 'herself' with her 'true' friends, where the friendship flowed in an ordinary, uncomplicated, grown-up fashion (emails, phone calls, drinks, dinners, banter and jokes that everyone got), but right now it felt like none of those friends knew her the raw, ugly, childish, basic way that Erika did.

She believed men's egos were as fragile as eggs.

For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she's spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

Was she ever grumpy? Did she ever yell? Fall about laughing? Eat too much? Drink too much? Call out for someone to bring her toilet paper? Lose her car keys? Was she ever just a human being?

Of course, a minute was enough. Never take your eyes off them. Never look away. It happens so fast. It happens without a sound. All those stories in the news. All those parents. All those mistakes she'd read about. ... Children with stupid, foolish, neglectful parents. Children who died while surrounded by so-called responsible adults. And each time she would pretend to be non-judgmental, but really, deep down she was thinking: Not me. That could never really happen to me.

In case she can't get what's in her head and her heart on the canvas. Maybe she's afraid of being afraid. That she'll be so paralyzed by fear she won't do a thing, she'll just stand there with her paintbrush, feeling like a fraud.