Quotes About Vulnerability

So it goes when we need to couple. Sex makes idiots of us all. ~ From "Am I Pretty Enough

A strong woman is a woman who craves love like oxygen or she turns blue choking. A strong woman is a woman who loves strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong in words, in action, in connection, in feeling; she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.

You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. ? The Velveteen Rabbit

Oversensitivity is the silent cause of all suffering. —Anonymous

Love is never easy or guaranteed. Real love is a leap, you know. As you get older, you learn how hard it is, how hard everything is, how we never know if there's ground beneath our feet, or if we'll be hurt or heartbroken. But we leap anyway. You have to take that leap.

Lightning could strike twice, three times, or ten. When you're on the wrong side of the odds, the odds are meaningless. They don't protect you or give you comfort.

so often my own emotions were hidden not only from other people but from myself. or perhaps it was the other way round: i was hiding from them.

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...

Maybe it only hurt so much because my body was in a solid state . . . I always tried to keep up appearances, and yet at the same time the thing I really wanted, the one thing I truly desired, was my liquefaction.

When our stoicism interferes with our humanity, we risk developing a wooden emotional life and an equally wooden personality. In contrast, the realization that our ability to work through pain makes us stronger than all of our efforts to exorcise it may in the long run alleviate its burden. It may enable us to take up our destiny as creatures whose very vulnerability renders us capable of inspired and truly awe-inspiring love.

Love is a slippery, unruly thing, and trying to control it robs us of its delicious unpredictability.

It felt like she took off running without me. Her fingers clenched in on mine. Then relaxed, like she'd lost all her bones.

instead of the smoldering, soul-baring, Abelard-to-Heloise-sans-castration solicitations you rightfully deserve, you're getting stupefying lines like: "I'm listening to NPR. Do you want to come over and make out?

Is this what love is? That you can see each other, even in the dark?

Why is she here at Herot Hall, where at any second something bad could come down the mountain, or tunnel up from below? Monsters. There's a whole world filled with monsters. They everywhere

Love is not this simple thing. Love isn't this obvious thing. It's not about that first moment of knowing. It's about what you keep doing after you break each other's hearts. It's about choosing each other on terrible days as well as on beautiful ones. It's about picking each other up off the floor and then laughing about it later. You can go pretty far into disaster as long as you're willing to look at each other again. You can fix a lot of failures. You can fail as long as you keep trying.

My imperfections make me less mournable.

But I ask you, wouldn't it be worse if I were perfect ? My imperfections make me less mournable.

Es ist immer einfacher, über die Dinge zu reden, die uns nicht wirklich berühren.

No one understood the simple truth: Klas had realized that what is most beautiful must be also most fragile. Now this is scary and hard to bear when you are little and don't know anything about the nature of glass. For it is very upsetting that the most beautiful things in life shatter so easily.

You keep your love wrapped in bird's nerves...

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently." —Pema Chödrön