Quotes About Vulnerability

We have, what, 66,000-odd guests here today? And not one of them retains even an infant's sense of self-preservation. They checked their fight-or-flight instincts at the door. That's what they're paying for. They see a fire, hear an explosion, feel their roller coaster begin to shear off its track—what are they gonna do? Laugh all the harder. Because they think it's part of the act. That makes every last one of them a sitting duck.

crying by this time, but so was I, and I wasn't ashamed. Grief had a way of sneaking up on a person. It lay in wait and pounced when your back was turned. Or it clung with sticky fingers twenty-four/seven, giving no reprieve.

Sagacity did not magically arrive with age. As his family grew, so did his affections. The deeper he loved, the more easily he was injured. His heart had not become reinforced. It had softened--and ripened. It was a larger target and far more easily rent.

I tell myself I don't have time, but the truth of the matter is I don't know how to reach out.

That's the thing about loving someone. You no longer own your heart, and that small, beating organ can turn on you without warning and shred you from the inside out.

I learn," she whispered, "that if you love somebody . . ." Slowly she lifted her face and looked straight into his eyes, the American way. "If you love somebody, you just better let them know while you still can.

We share our secrets when we're ready and not a minute before.

I'm tired of being Scarlett O'Hara. In my next life I'm going to come back as Melanie Wilkes, fragile and helpless.

Now when I'm down there blowing you, don't you worry about coming. I want it, baby. I want all of it, your hot spunk down my throat, spilling over my tongue. I wanna taste you for a week. So don't be shy. When you're ready, you come, okay?

I love you. Didn't you know that? I want to love you the way I wasn't able to before. Without holding back. Without either of us holding back.

Now our bones are revealed like truth.

Tu ne tenais pas de discours grandiloquents sur la fraternité, mais tu portais toujours une attention aux obscurs, aux vulnérables, pas uniquement parce que toi-même tu te rangeais parmi ceux-là, mais parce que les puissants pleins de certitude, ceux qui veulent à tout prix attirer la lumière sur eux, te faisaient craindre que ce monde ne devienne vraiment irrespirable.

Without a word, Carolyn held him...for a long, long time. Then, presently, she stood up, took hold of his hand and led him back to her bed, where she proceeded to put him back together again, piece by piece.

Suicide creates a monstrous emotional upsurge of shame and guilt. Everyone participates in feeling responsible and even shamed at knowing the suicidal candidate. If these feelings are not healed the vampire of suicidal death can strike again and again.

I think that if we can find the words, and if we can find someone to tell them to, then perhaps we can see things differently. But I had no words, and I had nobody. - 153

You can make yourself believe that someone can look into your eyes and read your mind. You can wish for it, or dread it. There is no cause for either. As long as you carry your words inside, they are safe. You are the sole keeper. But sometimes that is a terrible curse, Adam. Those unformed words take on an enormous weight. Sometimes the burden of them becomes more than you can carry. For me it did. I simply had to share it. And Angela came to me. (238)

I had tried marijuana several times, but in the words of my friend and longtime assistant Janet Stark, "When I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share.

I wasn't anybody at all. And I began to get afraid that all at once maybe my eyes would break open like soap bubbles and everybody would see there wasn't anything there, just a vile mess. And I was afraid that maybe the rot inside me would break out in sores and warts, screaming: 'traitor, sinner, imposter.'" Part

The sense of dependence and the narcissism that were to mark, and sometimes ruin, Sylvia's relationships in the future clearly originated in her childhood fear of abandonment.

Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection.

Possibly from the outside this looks determinedly individual. Nobody realises what a mess of loneliness and inadequacy I am inside.

Even those who never frown eventually break down.

There's somthing inside me that pulls beneath the surface. Consuming. Confusing. This lack of self-control I fear is never ending. Controlling. I can't seem To find myself again, My walls are closing in (Without a sense of confidence, I'm convinced that there's just too much pressure to take) I felt this way before... So insecure..

What I have always loved most in men is imperfection.