Quotes About Vulnerability

She recognized that that is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.

All people, male or female, were helpless in the specifics of their own bodies.

I'm beginning to think I feel too much. The feelings flood into me like so much water, and I am helpless against the onslaught.

The thing that really gets me," she said, "is that the worst kind of man, the kind that you would never allow yourself to be alone with, because you would know he was a danger to you, was left alone with all of us.

After you slept with a woman, she took away with her a small hunk of you. It wasn't bad, as long as the relationship went on. It was something you didn't mind giving up, because it would always be close by. It was only when things ended that you really felt the loss.

You are the only one I can trust about this," Ash said. Which was maybe just another version of what Cathy Kiplinger had said to Jules: you are weak.

The idea that something had been done to you seemed to implicate you, even though no one said it did, making your body—which usually lived in darkness beneath your clothing—suddenly live in light. Forever, if someone found out, you would be a person with a body that had been violated, breached. Also, forever you would be a person with a body that was visible and imaginable.

Sadness, excitement, then sadness again; it all rose and fell like the sounds of skaters scuffing the floor of the rink. Hold tight! she thought, conveying this to both herself and Cory, thinking of them in bed together, and the joint effort couples had to make to be a couple, and stay a couple. If one let go, then that was it, both of them fell. Hold tight! she thought, imagining his body, and her own much smaller body against it.

Love was a fish factory—love, with all its murk and stink. You had to really love someone to live with him or her in close quarters.

It could make you slightly psychotic if you really focused on the idea that girls had holes under their clothes. Holes that suggested, in the absence they pointed out, that they could be filled, and that you could do the filling.

Everyone has something to say. But not everyone can bear to say it. Your job is to find a way.

Why did a strong woman need to be her own shield

Does that scare you? Are you afraid that if I take away the mysterious part of you, I won't like you anymore?

Anyone who ever gave a speech," said Faith, "was once someone who didn't. ...

I must have no pride whatsoever that I put up with your coldness

knew everything about him, the way wives do. I even knew the inside of him, having been there that day in Dr. Ruffner's office to review the footage of Joe's colon. We sat and watched light travel through his most intimate inner tubing, and after that we were really bound together for life.

It's funny how you can go for a long time in life not needing someone, and then you meet them and you suddenly need them all the time.

Walking into someone's house was like entering their body. You saw what they were made of, and what they had been stewing in all this time.

Girls weren't weak. They had a softness sometimes, but not all the time.

It's basically my fear about what happens when you leave a room. Everyone says the thing about you that you really can't bear.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you'd always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely?

Loveless, we lay together.

I can't bear the idea of looking deeply. Because you inevitably turn up horrible things.

Later on, when it wasn't just facts that were required, it got so much harder for her. To have to put yourself out there - your opinions, your essence, the particular substance that churned inside you and made you who you were - both exhausted and frightened Greer.