Quotes About Vulnerability

I'm obsessed with crocodiles and getting eaten by one. When I hear that someone's been eaten by a crocodile or shark, I just get all gooey. I start salivating.

It's pretty impossible to hurt what Death protects.

It's the closest to death I have ever been. The chemotherapy takes you as far down into hell as you've ever, ever been.

Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

Chickens are brave till the foxes come at night; mortals are courageous till the death comes at twilight.

Are you always attracted to damaged women?" "I didn't know there were any other kind.

She knew all she needed to know about the history of the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn't need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there's the whole fucking deal.

Rosa was kneeling next to the bed now, stroking his scalp with one of her warm little hands. "Sick?" she asked. "Low self-esteem.

She wanted to collapse and be rescued, and she wanted to be heroic and prevail, and she seemed to hate him most for reminding her, merely by taking it all in, that she could manage neither.

That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for.

She's a fighter. She's fine. She's made tremendous strides." True—all the while he has been stoically enduring it she has made tremendous strides by finding it unendurable, by being devastated by it, destroyed by it, and then by denuding herself of it. She doesn't resist the blows the way he does; she receives the blows, falls apart, and when she gets herself up again, decides to make herself over.

A única obsessão que todos querem: 'amor'. As pessoas pensam que ao se apaixonar, elas se tornam inteiras? A união platônica de almas? Eu penso o contrário. Eu acho que você é inteiro antes de começar. E o amor quebra você. Você está inteiro, e então está quebrado.

Sabbath had the power, and he knew it, of being no one with anything much to lose.

Her ubiquity and his constipation, my mother flying in through the bedroom window, my father reading the evening paper with a suppository up his ass . . . these, Doctor, are the earliest impressions I have of my parents, of their attributes and secrets.

Silk aveva qualcosa che la faceva sempre tornare all'infanzia e alla paura che ha il bimbo precoce di essere visto per quello che è; ma anche alla paura che ha il bimbo precoce di non essere sufficientemente guardato. Temeva di essere smascherata, moriva dalla voglia di essere al centro dell'attenzione: ecco il suo dilemma.

As though the ever-hovering shadow of humiliation isn't in fact, what binds one to everyone else.

Misunderstanding must be nakedly exposed before true understanding can begin to flourish.

Imperfection is the prerequisite for grace. Light only gets in through the cracks.

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, 'I am human and you are God.

The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.

Throughout the Bible, in fact, God shows a marked preference for "real" people over "good" people.

So I'm trying, instead of shaming or pretending, to come to terms with my emotions, and bring them before God honestly. I have come to realize that I'm never going to stop having emotions, and probably strong emotions, because that is the way I'm wired.

the healthiest body is the one that feels the pain of its weakest parts. In