Quotes About Vulnerability

They crossed the Smith campus in clusters, these girls, as though they might simply tip over if forced to stand alone.

Will you be okay? I do not mean in a cosmic sense.

She was sexy in a malnourished way; you felt that if you took her to bed, first you would have to give her a hot meal.

Susannah was lonely; I knew that about her, could see it among all the other small trophies of unhappiness that she lined up on triumphant display for me, the way children often do, providing an entire museum of disappointments and inviting the parents in, as if to say: You see? You see how you fucked me up and what it led to? It led to this!

Dennis had fallen asleep before Jules got home, though he denied it in that strange way that people often deny they've been sleeping.

She sang along with them, her voice coming out in a loud quaver. But it didn't matter that you quavered; it only mattered that you made yourself heard.

strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit

It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her, or you could never hurt her at all.

Bobby pins crunching under my feet, I walk through, surveying the damaged girlness.

Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

That she was both fearless and fragile and could be hurt badly in ways he could not fix.

The New Coach. Did she look at us that first week and see past the glossed hair and shiny legs, our glittered brow bones and girl bravado? See past all that to everything beneath, all our miseries, the way we all hated ourselves but much more everyone else?

We never know, none of us, what love'll do to us.

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.

I know what that's like," he says. "The way you can be saved without ever knowing you were in trouble.

He'd tried to explain it to her, how accidents happen but we really are safe. But there was, already, the sense that nothing he said touched what was really bothering her, which was the realization that you can't stop bad things from happening to other people, other things. And that would be hard forever. He'd never quite gotten used to it himself.

Sometimes, during those same bleak middle-of-the-nights, he held secret fears he never said aloud. Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they'd come for his daughter too.

Here he is, the man who knows things and who should want to help me. But it is so hard to bring up things with any weight at all to a man like this. A man like this doesn't have real conversations.

Because there's a hundred ways sex can ruin you but there's no end to the ways love can.    Walking

But I would never tell anyone that," Dr Severin adds, leaning forward once more. She smiles ruefully. "You can never tell a man or he'll think, Ah! That's what driver her. And that's a way to weaken her.

There's a hundred ways sex can ruin you, but there's no end to the ways love can.

The raw, ugly, mottled things you fear about yourself in your most private moments--what happens when someone says them aloud to you? The feeling like your skin slipped from your body, showing everything, red and veined.

Many of these men, and the women too, sometimes even more so, would like to use your heart against you," she says. "They think it's a ticking time bomb in your chest, waiting to explode." "Maybe it is," Diane blurts out. I look at her. Severin smiles. "Maybe that's our strength.

The true terrorism of girls is the accuracy of their aim.