Quotes About Vulnerability

Removing your mask helps others remove theirs. Of course, this means acting as if you feel psychologically safe, even if you might not be fully there yet. Sometimes, you have to take an interpersonal risk to lower interpersonal risk.

Her keeper jersey; she thinks of it now. The number 1 on its back. A lonely number. Only one goalkeeper on the field. Only one player who guards the net. Only one who stands strong and alone behind the other ten players on the field. No place to hide. No way to disappear.

I am the kid who sticks her finger in the light socket. I am the person who doesn't check the expiration date on the milk. I am the idiot who has never looked before she leaped. I am the girl who is falling apart, right now.

But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn't be trusted to hold when you're the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control.

After a while, it got too hard not to let him take my hand in the hallway, or snug up behind me at my locker, his chin balanced on the top of head as his hands snaked around my waist. After a while I wanted to share it, to show it off, to let the world see why I was smiling like a complete idiot half the time.

Love like that is what they make movies about. It's the thing you're supposed to want, the answer to every question, the song that you're supposed to sing. But love like that can be too big, too. It can be something you shouldn't be trusted to hold when you're the kind of person who drops the eggs and breaks the remote control. Love doesn't break easily, I found. But people do.

She lifted the girl's shirt, showing her ribs and the pointy bumps of her spine. They were like the bones of some animal who'd starved to death in the desert. Her flesh, the dark sand blown in thin drifts over the bones.

I want to know everything about you, so I tell you everything about myself.

When you're in a train and it breaks down, well, there you is. But when you're in a plane and it breaks down, there you AIN'T.

When Jesus told His followers, "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3), He was pointing toward the vulnerability and openness that are essential for those of us who aren't children to inherit the kingdom of God. This identification with children was important to Fred.

Just as he heralded the importance of expressing other kinds of emotions, Fred felt it essential to give others permission to grieve over the losses in their lives. He learned that lesson himself when he was six years old.

Acclaimed writer and thinker Madeleine L'Engle once noted, in her treatise on the spiritual rhythms of life, The Irrational Season, "Righteousness begins to reveal itself as that strength which is so secure that it can show itself as gentleness, and the only people who have this kind of righteousness are those who are integrated and do not suppress the dark side of themselves.

That's what we both wanted. To be read. To be asked. To have someone in our lives we couldn't fool.

Bi," Tom interrupted as if it were crucial he retain some kind of toehold on heterosexuality, then flinched.

Sometimes I wonder if that's the thing that will break us in the long run. That it's so hard for you to trust in us.

I love you. I want to shout it sometimes. I know you worry about our letters and texts getting read--shades of WWII, haunting us still, I guess, and I'm well aware that nothing's safe on the internet. I worry too. You need to know that when I say it, when I ask you to say it, it's because my lungs feel full of dark water, and seeing it or writing it lets me breathe.

God. No wonder it was so easy. He's been bleeding since he was a baby. He just never told anyone. How do you even know it hurts after all that time?" Because you loved me, and I knew what it meant to feel.

Because it's you and basketball, Christian. Only one of you can break my heart.

The whole world heard you tell poor Angie Robinson that "Chris Edwards was your heart"—man, it's one of the most fucking romantic things I've ever heard.

The world isn't made a better place by the unburdening of a heart.

I thought your boyfriend died?" Nicky asked, and it was actually a good question, and I was so mad that I wasn't even embarrassed to answer him. "We were three," I choked out. "I had a night lover and a day lover," I said, and it felt like poetry, just to say it there in public in the middle of the quad, under the foggy sun. "And they loved each other like night loves the day. And then the night lover died, and the day lover and I were naked in the sunshine, with only ourselves for cover.

For Christ's sake, Ian, he was stealing your cash! I hope you at least wore a raincoat, you feel me? Ian blinked. Why would I want a raincoat, Joel? I was having sex. Joel put his face in his hands, closed his eyes tight, and prayed that when he looked up and opened then Ian would be kidding. He wasn't

Green smiled at me, all that compassion in his eyes, and he cupped my face in his hands, as though it were delicate, and precious. "You must never leave me," he said solemnly. "You may take as many lovers as you want, but you must promise to always be here to make me feel like I can do all that needs to be done.

Oh—and you need to work on making my opinion more important than Josh's, too. I know it's a stretch—he's your most intimate relationship to date, but when you're balls deep in my ass, I'd prefer you not be wondering if it counts as a workout.