Quotes About Vulnerability

Love with someone else, an actual person, was another matter. People got hurt doing that. People cried and wrapped their arms around themselves and rocked with loss. Loving words got turned to fierce, sharp, whip-cracks of anger that lefft permanent marks. At the least, it disappointed you. At most, it damaged you.

We hurt each other, is the point. Hurt, annoy, embarrass, but move on. People, it just doesn't work that way. Your own feelings get so complicated that you forget the ways another human being can be vulnerable. You spend a lot of energy protecting yourself. All those layers and motivations and feelings. You get hurt, you stay hurt sometimes. The hurt affects your ability to go forward. And words. All the words between us. Words can be permanent. Certain ones are impossible to forgive.

A person is never as quiet or unrestrained as they seem, or as bad or good, as vulnerable or as strong, as sweet or as feisty; we are thickly layered, page lying upon page, behind simple covers. And love - it is not the book itself, but the binding. It can rip us apart or hold us together...Layers, by their nature, are fragile things.

A new person in your life gives the rest of you a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave. I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this exact thing I wasn't even really, that made him the most insecure.

No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you'd think.

Maybe sometimes you just feel like everything can be taken from you all at once.

Sometimes you build up these walls, you build and you build and you build up these walls and you think they're so strong, but then someone can come along and tip them over with only his fingers, or the weight of his breath.

Love seems to be something to approach with caution, as if you'd come across a wrapped box in the middle of the street and have no idea what it contains.

I thought I might cry, the way you do when someone gives you some kindness when you most need it but when it seems the most surprising thing.

A relationship could be a place to hide too.

She survived something big, and when you survive something big, you are always, always aware that next time you might not.

Another person is, at the heart of it, unknowable. And if you cannot know a person enough to always guess what they're capable of, you certainly cannot know them enough to hold them in your hands, to control their behavior, to fight, manipulate, cajole or nurse or soothe them into doing what they should or shouldn't. People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your own helplessness about that little fact.

What's that about? Love must be more about power than we think, if even in its most intimate moment of expression we think about not being the one who risks the most.

We had lain together, skin on skin, been as close as two people could, and he was a stranger. He was that someone who you are afraid of as a child, stranger. They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.

Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can't, is all.

He's alright. He's fine," Dad says, his usual line whenever Oliver gets hurt. It means: Go away. Don't baby him. Don't show too much compassion. The other dads do this too. It's some kind of group hysteria, based on some fatherly fear that says compassion equals homosexuality.

This is the problem with danger, isn't it? You can even be warned and ignore the warning. Danger can seem far away until the sky grows dark, and a bolt of fury heads straight toward you.

A human heart is the size of two hands clasped together. Imagine your own hands joined, or your hand in someone else's, because that is what hands are for, and what hearts are for: holding each other. This can be very, very hard to remember when hearts have been so broken.

When you go looking for rescue, you end up trapped in your own weakness.

You have the ability to just go on and forget people and how much they are meant, but I don't. You can people in their own little boxes and leave them there. So much for love. So much for soul mates. I'm sorry you don't want to believe the best or how I can change. You put a stake through the heart. I'm the only one who cared enough to suffer like this.

I guess I was inching and crawling my way toward Elizabeth Bennett's words about unconditional love. That it was a dangerous thing without heavy doses of mutual respect.

We try to hold a storm in our own fist but we are not that strong.

Turned up or turned down, the feeling is permanent. She survived something big, and when you survive something big, you are always, always aware that next time you might not.

Fragile things become undone at a frightening speed.