Quotes About Vulnerability

Defensiveness shuts down honesty and keeps truth from being expressed.

Aqui digo: que se teme por amor; mas que, por amor, também, é que a coragem se faz.

Once when I asked you if you still loved your wife, you said, Love leaves the back door open. Later, you said, Love like a hospital gown opens at the back. And you slipped out.

I tell you this true story just to prove that I can. That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story.

When I began writing these pages I believed their subject to be children, the ones we have and the ones we wish we had, the ways in which we depend on our children to depend on us, the ways in which we encourage them to remain children, the ways in which they remain more unknown to us than they do to their more casual acquaintances; the ways in which we remain equally opaque to them.

These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible.

Once she was born, I was never not afraid.

I cannot count the days on which I found myself driving abruptly blinded by tears.

The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print.

Les gens qui ont perdu quelqu'un ont un air particulier, que seuls peut-être ceux qui l'ont décelé sur leur propre visage peuvent reconnaître. Je l'ai remarqué sur mon visage et je le remarque à présent sur d'autres. C'est un air d'extrême vulnérabilité, une nudité, une béance.

It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young?

Although the knowledge that their friends love them and sorrow for them is a great solace, the nearest afflicted must be protected from any one or anything which is likely to overstrain nerves already at the threatening point, and none have the right to feel hurt if they are told they can neither be of use or be received. At such a time, to some people companionship is a comfort, others shrink from their dearest friends.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness.

Above all, she is the girl who feels things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only

Il dolore non tiene le distanze. Il dolore arriva a ondate, parossismi, ansie improvvise che ti tagliano le gambe e ti accecano e cancellano la quotidianità della vita.

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded by happiness.

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.

She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.

Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.

To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplused apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

I love you, she whispered, but it was more a plea than a declaration and in any case he made no response.

Everyone was in scrubs. I noticed one man who was not in scrubs. "Is this the wife," he said to the driver. Then he looked at me. "I'm your social worker." And I guess that was when I knew. That's something else to remember. If they give you a social worker, you're in trouble.

our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable "I.