Quotes About Vulnerability

If the raging waters had reached out to swallow me, I would have let them. I wanted to die that day—I did—and there'd been other times, too. Not many, but they were there, and as I watched Ernest twitch in an uneasy sleep, I couldn't help wondering if we all had them. And if so, if we survived them, was it by chance alone? Hours

He was like a boy when he slept well. I could see the child he used to be under the man, and I loved them both, simply and completely and irreversibly. I tucked myself beneath his arm, and felt his breath moving in and out, and let myself sleep.

then, hardly daring to breathe, lowered myself onto him. But it was too late. Before I had even begun to move, he softened inside me. I tried to kiss him, but he wouldn't meet my eyes.

The surrender in it seemed to have cut new lines around his brown eyes.

He's like a human bomb with dozens of trip wires. Some of them I can see, but most are deeply inside him.

After a year of fumbling and embarrassing encounters with Jock, I was finally learning what sex was, and that I liked it. Boy would come into my cottage at night and wake me by roughly pressing against me, his hands everywhere before I was fully conscious.

The stickiest sorts of violence are often incredibly intimate, Will. They require trust. They take time.

He would eat me here or drag me off to a glade or valley only he knew of, a place from which I'd never return. The last thought I remember having was This is how it feels, then. This is what it means to be eaten by a lion.

The sensitive readers, they have a certain look. You can al. most smell it on them, that they need books to feel okay.

There wasn't anything simple about them, and I preferred that, and trusted it. My life wasn't simple either.

Getting your heart broken is the privilege of being human, Eden used to say. I didn't know what

He'd left me for a time. He'd doubted me, but now he was mine again and I wanted to keep him here in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets until I'd quieted every last voice and we were only right again.

I didn't feel old enough to be anyone's wife, or that I knew enough or had lived enough, or understood the essential things. I didn't know how to say any of this to Jock, either. That I was afraid of the promises we'd made. That late at night as I lay beside him in bed I felt lonely and numb, as if some part of me had died.

I close my eyes an lean into Ernest, smelling bourbon and soap, tobacco and damp cotton - and everything about this moment is so sharp and lovely, I do something completely out of character and just let myself have it.

Before the nausea set in, we had managed to make love on my narrow bunk, but the whole thing was such a tangle of elbows and knees and bumping chins, I barely knew the thing was happening before it was over. Afterwards, he kissed my cheek and said, "That was lovely, sweetheart." Then he crawled out of my bunk and into his, while I was left feeling just as lost and confused as I had been on our wedding night. Jock

Over time, I've developed a kind of radar for victims, and Cameron Curtis is deeply familiar, almost as if a neon sign flashes over her head, telegraphing her story, her vulnerability. And not just to me. However the sign has gotten there, I know predators can see it too, luridly bright and unmistakable.

He pulled me into the room and way lay on the featherbed and made love. And I was reminded of what was best about us. How very easy and natural we could be as bodies, with no sharp angles or missteps and no need for talking. How in bed, as nowhere else, he was my favorite animal and I was his.

Did you ever think it could be like this? The way we're happening to each other?

I want to write something, but I don't think I can without being emotional." "Just make a start. Begin anywhere." "It might be terrible." "It might be. That's not the worst thing." "No," I agreed. And it wasn't. The worst thing—I already knew it—would be feeling too scared to try.

How dreadful it would be if everything toppled you and you folded in.

When things got hard and you felt shaky, she liked to say, you could hit your knees wherever you were, and the world would be there to catch you.

With the things that matter most, we guard them carefully. Sometimes we tell no one, and sometimes just one person, the one who knows us best.

I found myself feeling differently about marriage, and about the damage lovers could do to one another, irreparable damage sometimes, and almost without thinking.

we'd given up trying to fool anyone, even ourselves.