Quotes About Vulnerability

His innocence could still frighten me.

Tell me," I said, "how do you know that your father is not right about my poisons? How do you know I will not drug you where you sit?" "I do not." "Yet you would dare to stay?" "I dare anything," he said. And that is how we came to be lovers.

And that's when I'm supposed to open my eyes like a dewy fawn, and see him poised over me like the sun, and make a little gasping noise of wonder and gratitude, and then he fucks me.

I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath.

He holds me so tightly I can feel the faint beat of his chest, like the wings of a moth. An echo, the last bit of spirit still tethered to my body. A torment.

She wears a cape, and it is this that undoes her—that allows her to be pulled, limbs light and poised as a cat, from her horse.

They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry. Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

Later, Achilles sleeps next to me. Odysseus' storm has come, and the coarse fabric of the tent wall trembles with its force. I hear the stinging slap, over and over, of waves reproaching the shore. He stirs and the air stirs with him, bearing the musk-sweet smell of his body. I think: This is what I will miss. I think: I will kill myself rather than miss it. I think: How long do we have?

Is there a moment that a heart cracks?

If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man. When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry. Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong

If they did not weep, I would not either.

It occurred to him that seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.

She knew - she knew by now - that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too? It was part of the wholeness, that he must; and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.

He had the distracted chuckle of troubled old people who look within, keeping watch on failing organs.

O thank you, Uncle Omar. Thank you for instilling a helpless youth with such grave suspicions of women and all their works, that here and now, in my maturity, in my thirty-second year, I cannot confront a lovely and half-naked lady without getting cramps in my toes and saying gahr.

A bird, a horse, a dog, a man, a girl, or a cat—you knock them about and diminish yourself because all you do is prove yourself equally vulnerable.

I had to make a guess about what would be right and what would be wrong for her. I had to take a risk. I based the risk on what I know of loneliness, of the need of closeness in loneliness. I stroked her, totally impersonal, the way you soothe a terrified animal. At first she would leap and buck at the slightest touch. After a while there was only a tremor when I touched her, and finally that too was gone. She hiccuped and at last fell down into sleep, curled and spent.

He was in a gigantic circular bed, with a pink canopy over it. In all the luxuriant femininity of that big bedroom, George looked shrunken and misplaced, like a dead worm in a birthday cake.

I went back to Lois. She had a glass of bourbon that looked like a glass of iced coffee. Her smile was loose and wet and her eyes didn't track.

In a little while she got up and went over and closed the door and came back, dropped her halter top and her sun shorts to the floor beside the bed, stood there for not more than two seconds and then stretched out beside me. She bent over the side of the bed and got her cigarettes out of the pocket of the sun shorts, lit two and gave me one and lay back in the circle of my arm, huffed out a big cloud of smoke

We are all at the mercy of the hostility

That's the way They do you. That's the way They set you up for it. There ought to be a warning bell on the happy-meter, so that every time it creeps high enough, you get that dang-dang alert. Duck, boy. That glow makes you too visible. One of Them is out there in the boonies, adjusting the windage, getting you lined up in the cross hairs of the scope.

Many feelings and behaviors are no doubt left over from childhood. Children feel weak and vulnerable; they are dependent, and they feel that dependency strongly; they don't think much of themselves; they have a constant need for approval; they are very prone to anxiety and quick to anger. They have no patience. To a degree, we all continue to generate some of those feelings unconsciously right on into adulthood. What varies from person

Every boy, in his journey to become a man, takes an arrow in the center of his heart, in the place of his strength. Because the wound is rarely discussed and even more rarely healed, every man carries a wound. And the wound is nearly always given by his father.