Quotes About Vulnerability

The truth between two people always cuts two ways.

I am a total zombie just after I wake up. It takes me half an hour even to get my eyes open. Ask anyone who knows me. I can't see; I can't talk properly; I can't do anything without help. The only think I can do properly is think. And I know how to exploit my condition. I've had years of practice.

if the spell was off, I'd have my heart eaten before I could turn around." "Don't you want your heart eaten?" asked the fire. [...] "Naturally I don't," Sophie answered.

Mother knows you don't have to be unkind to someone in order to exploit them.

You should prize this pain of yours. This is what will make you human all the way through. Nothing less will do that.

Much more. We're joined at the heart. Bad luck for you, I'm afraid. My ticker's pretty wonky. Too much boozing. His eyes twinkled, and he drew me close. Not enough kissling.

Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate—love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we are as daring as gladiators.

any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all (91): This curse of closely knit species also applies to our dairy cows, now almost clones of one another; an illness that kills one can kill all.

Sometimes it was hard to express how much you loved someone. You said the words, but you could never quite capture the depth of it. You could never quite hold someone tightly enough.

No matter how many people care about you, she thought, if you can't be open with them about who you truly are, you're still alone.

You and me, I said,we both got the same kind of hurt inside us. She nodded, and suddenly, just like that, I knew I could trust her with my life.

A fragile thing, brittle-looking, an objet d' art, round and perfect: but for how long? From far enough out in orbit, one has no doubt that one could drop the Earth on the floor of night and break it. An urge arises to step softly, to speak quietly, so as to keep whoever might be carrying the pretty toy from being startled and fumbling it.

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

She could not read a book for fear of the feelings she might find in it.

But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own thoughts. It is very aggravating to be presented to oneself in a light so different from the familiar one, even when it is clearly a false light. I will not write any more.

What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or taste; perhaps we transmit them unknowingly by vibrations in the air. Whatever the means, I knew just as surely that it was nothing about me in particular that alarmed her, but only the fact that I had come and was a stranger.

a single lupine exhalation could reduce it to rubble.

Lack of respect could make you angry. Lack of trust could get you killed.

Death stalked her baby, and she had no bullets to protect him.

Far from championing the cause of women, blacks, and other minorities, Democrats have historically brutalized, segregated, exploited, and murdered the most vulnerable members of our society.

Not all writing is political or revolutionary, but the very act of giving yourself permission to write, to speak, to share the truth no matter whether the truth you understand is the truth others want to acknowledge, is brave, powerful, and important.

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused.…Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen." —George Saunders

Incidentally, I never felt less brisk in my life, because being looked at like that makes a person feel dizzy.

It was so nice that Simon was here for it - tell him I enjoyed every minute - ' it was glorious writing that - almost like telling him I was glad he'd kissed me. But after I'd posted the letter I was worried in case he guessed what I'd meant.