Quotes About Vulnerability

Her grief has not so much changed her as stripped her down, stripped her body and her face.

Convictions in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential.

more like pleas from nuns about to be shown the facts of life by Bonaparte's grenadiers, than a sailor's concern for his ship.

There's something illiberal about the way infants are thrust into the hands of people who have no idea what they're doing, who can only experiment.

But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went.

holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went. Without knowing what it was, I'd felt that tension in his little groping arms and fitful legs, the discomfort of the foreknowledge

We ward off love because it presents itself to us as a demand: to acknowledge another person's needs, and thus our own; to glimpse their mortality, and thus ours. We each have our own means of achieving this avoidance.

how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control. A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.

What I want to say is that we still don't know each other, that we're still discovering each other, and of course because it's no longer the beginning it isn't always, or even mostly, a romantic proposition--the not knowing, the wanting to know--but there is the wanting. Certainly there are times when I think maybe it's one-sided, that he knows just about all of me that he cares to, and that I'm the one who's still deciphering, which can be its own source of resentment.

Was it this image of the woman she once was that made her fingers tremble? Or did she feel for this man in her bed who'd quietly started weeping for reasons she didn't understand?

Nonc is on his side, looking at a boy whose breathing is untroubled for all he's been through, though there's a lack of shine in his eyes, as if the little light in him might someday go out. His breath is clean and perfect, though, sweet-smelling.

Commander Ga went on, "I know you pretended to be asleep one morning to give me more time to study you, to allow me to see the knot in your collarbone where someone had hurt you. You let me see the scars on your knees, scars that tell me you once knew real work. You wanted me to know the real you.

What happened?" Buc asked him. "I told her the truth about something," Ga answered. "You've got to stop doing that," Buc said. "It's bad for people's health.

Ashamed is just grateful waiting to happen. You only taste your dignity right before you puke it up.

If we act safe while it's safe for us to be dangerous, we're not taking advantage of being in love, and we could ruin it that way.

With your Social Security number in the wind, whoever finds it—or, more likely, whoever buys it on one of the many black-market information exchanges on the deep web—holds the keys to every part of your life. What that means—plain and simple—is that you're going to need an efficient way to keep one eye over your shoulder, all the time.

The point was to learn what it was we feared more: being misunderstood or being betrayed.

It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.

You only taste your own dignity right before you puke it up.

Being humiliated only makes it easier to restrain you. And being restrained makes it possible to torture you, for the unrestrained cannot be tortured; the unrestrained can only be fought. So to be restrained is to be unable to fight, and to be humiliated is to be readied for torture. To know you have been readied for torture is to await torture. And to await torture is, itself, torture.

I'm fiercely independent, but I'm also terrified of being alone.

At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused.

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.

Kindness—that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself—has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality).