Quotes About Vulnerability

This Thursday night felt like adolescence: exquisitely painful and sharply beautiful.

She remembered that raw sensation she'd felt after previous relationships had ended. For months afterward, it had felt like she'd lost a layer of skin. If she'd felt like that after those meaningless boys, what would she feel like after breaking with Nick? She'd been so cozy in the cocoon of their relationship. She assumed she got to stay there forever.

She'd been lacking in so much confidence when she was a teenager, worrying all the time about what people thought of her and how they might hurt her, without even considering the impact she might have on their feelings.

It was why marriages fell apart. It was why, if you valued your marriage, you kept a barricade around yourself and your feelings and your thoughts. You didn't let your eyes linger. You didn't stay for the second drink. You kept the flirting safe. You just didn't go there.

I didn't have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn't have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn't have backup. I didn't have insurance to cover a loss like this.

It sometimes seemed so peculiar and so wrong that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with him and wake up with him, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don't even know his telephone number, or where he's living or working, or what he did today or last week or last year.

They'd been too tired to keep sharpening the edges of their hurt feelings.

It's kind of devastating." She paused. "And, Madeline, it infuriates me that I found it so devastating. It infuriates me that he had that power over me. I look in the mirror each day, and I think, 'I'm not overweight anymore,' but he's right, I'm still ugly. Intellectually I know I'm not ugly, I'm perfectly acceptable. But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It's pathetic.

in times of crisis a person's face is somehow stripped back to something essential and universally human: all those labels like "beautiful," "sexy," "plain" became irrelevant.

He just randomly, arbitrarily, idiotically broke her heart.

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.

But love after you've hurt each other and forgiven each other, bored each other and surprised each other, after you've seen the worst and the best – that sort of a love is ineffable. It deserves its own word.

When he first met her odd, detached parents he understood that Heather had grown up starved of love, and when you're starved of something you should receive in abundance, you never quite trust it.

still beat him on the court. His father knew his strengths, his weaknesses, his strategies. Logan was powerless

Did she have to go to parties on her own again now? She remembered that raw sensation she'd felt after previous relationships had ended. For months afterward, it had felt like she'd lost a layer of skin. If she'd felt like that after those meaningless boys, what would she feel like after breaking with Nick? She'd been so cozy in the cocoon of their relationship. She assumed she got to stay there forever.

The girl said, 'Sometimes you locked me in my room with only water. I had to ration the water. That was a terrible thing to do to a little girl. I thought I would be there forever. I thought I would die. I think I might have come close to dying. A few times.

It gave me a shock. A sudden shock of indescribable pain, like when you're a kid, and you're hit on the nose with a basketball on a cold morning, and you cannot believe how much it hurts, and your friends all laugh and you want your mother so bad.

When her life fell apart there hadn't been one friend whom Tess could call. Not one friend. That's why she was behaving like this with Connor. She needed a friend.

And, Madeline, it infuriates me that I found it so devastating. It infuriates me that he had that power over me. I look in the mirror each day, and I think, I'm not overweight any more, but he's right, I'm still ugly. Intellectually I know I'm not ugly, I'm perfectly acceptable. But I feel ugly, because one man said it was so, and that made it so. It's pathetic.

Now she was stuck in the pool because she didn't want to get out in front of him. She would have thought she was too old to worry about her body being observed and judged in a swimsuit, but apparently this neurosis began at twelve years old and never ended.

She hadn't realized that you could spend your whole life looking at the people you loved in an oblique, halfhearted way, as if you were deliberately blurring your vision, until something like this happened, and then just looking at that person could be terrifying.

They could fall in love with fresh new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of 'otherness', a level far beyond what sort of music they liked.

Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky. She

She combines them all into one giant sumo wrestler of humanity and punches him again and again in his big flabby stomach.