Quotes About Vulnerability

Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open—not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.

Does that mean you

I didn't know how cold I was," she admitted after a time. "You mean that interesting shade of blue isn't lipstick?

I'm not saying Barra's bad, exactly, but I am saying you think she's good at heart because you like her and want her to be good at heart. It doesn't work that way. If you don't learn to see people as they are, you'll get hurt someday.

She could not think about it Ã¢â'¬Â¦ any of it Ã¢â'¬Â¦ without going to pieces.

that was Evelyn's weakness. She was too kind, and too truthful. Both, I have found, are inconvenient character traits.

This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times.

The disaster of being old was in not feeling safe to venture anywhere, of seeing freedom put out of reach.

There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk—to believe, and to risk everything for your belief.

If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent, and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave, judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless, and forgiven. And

remembered how I was only a speck after all in uncomfortably limitless space, of no account whatever in the general scheme of things, but with a horrid private capacity for being often and easily hurt; and how specks have a trick of dying, which I in my turn would presently do, and a fresh speck, not nearly so nice, as I hoped and believed, would immediately start up and fill my vacancy, perhaps so exactly my vacancy that it would even wear my gloves and stockings.

Sitting there in the dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black world.

The woman has a beak,' he thought, standing red and tongue-tied before her. 'She's a bird of prey. She has got her talons into my Catherine. Linked together! Good God.

I am so tired of the girl in the infirmary, I am so sick of the girl who cries wolf all the time - even though not one of those cries was ever a false alarm. Not one of my pleas was ever less than truly urgent because when it's all in your mind, there always IS a wolf.

A deeply true, wholly aching account of the dangerous way we live now--LOVE JUNKIE is great fun to read, and finally fully redemptive. Rachel Resnick brings a light, delightful touch to a hard subject, and creates a great, relatable, readable memoir.

What makes you think i'm so rich you can steal my heart and i won't feel a thing?

Just like I didn't dare tell Jack that I was falling in love with him when I was down in Texas, wanting to be a modern woman who's supposed to be able to handle the casual nature of these kinds of relationships. I'm never supposed to say, to Jack or anyone else, what makes you think I'm so rich that you can steal my heart and it won't mean a thing?

At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.

Depression gave me extreme perspicacity; rather than skin, it was as if I had only thin gauze bandages to shield me from everything I saw.

Whether the emotion is true or truly wished for, anytime anything resembling love comes my way, it makes a fool of me. It

I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.

Yes, there was a certain beautiful honesty to my depressed state—I miss it sometimes now. I miss having so little stake in maintaining the status quo that I could walk out of rooms in tears at times that other people would have deemed inappropriate. I liked that about myself. I liked that disregard for convention.

How could I let anybody see me this way? How could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? I was one big mistake.