Quotes About Vulnerability

She felt silence growing in her. Sometimes it reminded her of a fast-growing ivy; silence covered her and cloaked her, and she suspected that one day she would smother in the silences Hest could create. It was an effort to break through that strangling quiet, but she did it.

Yet in any relationship there is always the capacity for abuse. Just as a husband may beat his wife, or a wife pare her husband's soul with belittlement

You should have asked me! You should have asked me!" I hated the tears that suddenly flooded my eyes and how my throat closed and choked me. I didn't want to be sad. I wanted to be angry. Angry hurt less." p. 501 Bee to Fitz

Her anger was hard for me to bear, but weeping would have been worse." p. 513

She taught me that being open was simply not being closed. And going into another's mind is mostly done by being willing to go outside of your own.

It is quite one thing to admit a fault to yourself. It is another thing entirely to have a friend not only agree with you, but point out the full depth of the fault.

You scared her." "She scares herself. They all do

He would fear everyone he did not control. And the next day he would fear those he controlled even more.

In times like these, perhaps a Queen with a knife will give us more heart than a woman who drapes herself in jewels and hides behind walls.

Sometimes," he observed obliquely, "you have to trust people to understand you are not perfect.

Honor and courtesy and justice…they are not real, Fitz. We all pretend to them, and hold them up like shields. But they guard only against folk who carry the same shields. Against those who have discarded them, they are no shields at all, but only additional weapons to use against their victims.

Tears welled in my eyes. Perhaps, I thought, if I do not blink, they will not spill. Perhaps if I sat very still long enough, somehow my eyes would reabsorb the tears.

You take refuge in the bully's first strength: what you can destroy.

Yours is a true heart, Vespertilio. Beware of it, for it is surely too large for thy chest to contain.

When tears fall that silently and that quickly, they're coming from your heart. It's like you have a soul-wound, and I just punctured it, and it bled tears.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that if Duval ever feels smothered by me, it will be because I am holding a pillow over his face.

It is this kindness of his that unsettles me most. I can dodge a blow or block a knife. I am impervious to poison and know a dozen ways to escape a chokehold or garrote wire. But kindness? I do not know how to defend against that.

Women will always pay the price for love, that is why God makes us so much stronger than men.

For a moment in time, a man knew me for who I was and, without reservation, loved me for who I was. How can I now live knowing no one will ever see me again in such a perfect light? Hear me as I wish to be heard? Love me as [he] loved me?

The big difference between my mom and me-- besides the fact that she is dead normal and I'm a magic-handling freak-- is that she's the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people's points of view, but she's honest about it. She's a brass-bound bitch because she believes she knows best. I'm a brass-bound bitch because I don't want anyone getting close enough to find out what a whiny little knot of naked nerve endings I really am.

America is one of the last places left on earth where every citizen, until the day he or she dies, is exposed to the risk of personal bankruptcy because of illness or disease. It does not matter how industrious we are, how carefully we save and invest, or how moral we are in our personal and family life. We are all just one long hospital stay away from losing everything.

Women from dysfunctional homes (and especially, I have observed, from alcoholic homes) are overrepresented in the helping professions, working as nurses, counselors, therapists, and social workers. We are drawn to those who are needy, compassionately identifying with their pain and seeking to relieve it in order to ameliorate our own.

Preaching is, after all, an audacious and dangerous act.

it is only when you have mastered the art of loving yourself that you can truly love others. it's only when you have opened your own heart that you can touch the hearts of others. when you feel centered and alive, you are in much better position to be a better person.