Quotes About Vulnerability

Like your insides are too close to the surface?

When an old person dies," Kent said, "even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They're like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked over.

She existed outside her own body-she was scattered across this ground-but somehow this made her feel less vulnerable. She was painted into this family, mirrored in her father's face. She was more abundant than she'd believed possible.

Some cover themselves with a jacket or blanket; like turtles, they withdraw into their shells.

together. He'd always assumed openness was synonymous with danger

that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them.

When an old person dies," Kent said, "even if that person is wonderful, he or she is still somewhat ready, and so are the people who loved them. They're like old trees, whose roots have loosened in the ground. They fall gently. But when someone like your aunt Sylvie dies—before her time—her roots get pulled out and the ground is ripped up. Everyone nearby is in danger of being knocked

When Sylvie was a child, she'd watched in amazement when friends, upset about a bad day at school or a slight from a boy they had a crush on, burst into tears at the sight of their mother. Their mother was their safe space, and so, with her, they felt every iota of their feelings.

He wanted to know where the ice was weakest beneath their feet so he could keep them from falling through.

The dream was now in the air at risk of the elements beyond her grasp.

if it was your fault, then you weren't powerless--you weren't at the mercy of stuff just happening." "Your always going to be at thee mercy of stuff just happening, no matter what.

People like to see a king uncrowned, like to see a thoroughbred racehorse beaten when he's running at the top of his form and has outrun everything in sight. They wanted to see that the king, the top dog, the best man, has a flaw, can be beaten like them, is vulnerable like them, can be defeated, unfrocked, uncrowned, knocked down, and thus brought right down to their level.

We might have been friends, if you had had a slightly lower set of standards, if your judgements of people had been less unkind, less critical; if that outer layer of pride had not been so prickly, so impenetrable.

My dear sir,' said Emily, timidly, 'what mean those tears?'—they speak, I fear, another language—they plead for me.

The weakness of humanity is never willingly perceived by young minds.

Because I had already resolved that if you're afraid of love, your heart will break anyway, only in not half so nice a fashion as it does when you let somebody love you.

Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that "to have children is to give hostages to fate.

God with us." When our sins made it impossible for us to come to him, God took the outrageous step of coming to us, of making himself susceptible to sorrow, familiar with temptation, and vulnerable to sin's disruptive power, in order to cancel its claim. In Jesus we see how extreme God's love is.

All that I am hangs by a thread tonight

No other looked into her secret eyes. Nobody dared.

No one else was as close and as open, No one else so boiled my blood, Even he, who consigned me to torment, Even he, who caressed and forgot.

There was nothing on any of the canvasses that she would have liked to hide or conceal, nor was she ashamed of being thus exposed through her work, good or bad though it might be, the essence, the unique flavour of days when she had been happily engrossed in recreating a face or a garment, in inventing an effective light, in applying an expressive glaze.

Being loved back by the person he loved to the point where he couldn't cope anymore with the vulnerable reciprocity of giving and receiving, he ended the relationship to get it over with before he lost it

That was a mistake: to have been emotional, to have been seen and heard to be emotional,