Quotes About Vulnerability

Charles Wallace, the danger here is greatest for you. Why? Because of what you are. Just exactly because of what you are you will be by far the most vulnerable. You must stay with Meg and Calvin. You must not go off on your own. Beware of pride and arrogance, Charles, for they may betray you.

I wish human beings couldn't have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.

We are all broken, we human creatures, and to pretend we're not is to inhibit healing.

To love anyone is to hope in him always. From the moment at which we begin to judge anyone, to limit our confidence in him, from the moment at which we identify [pigeonhole] him, and so reduce him to that, we cease to love him, and he ceases to be able to become better. We must dare to love in a world that does not know how to love.

Why can't I hide it, too? Meg thought. Why do I always have to show everything?

It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

The greatest challenge a teacher has to accept is the courage to be; if we are, we make mistakes; we say too much where we should have said nothing; we do not speak where a word might have made all the difference. If we are, we will make terrible errors. But we still have to have the courage to struggle on, trusting in our own points of reference to show us the way.

Don't be afraid to be afraid.

And I was, as clearly as I can express something that is really unexpressible, out on the other side of fear.

she stopped herself from being hurt long, long ago by not letting herself love anybody or anything.

I've made myself vulnerable I've let myself care. I've opened my firmly closed heart. My safety is gone It's no longer there My protection is falling apart. Nobody promised Our hearts would be safe Or our bodies protected from harm. A moment can change All we think that we have, Hope will endure through the storm. Troubling a Star Madeleine L'Engle

I wish human beings couldn't have feelings. I am having feelings. They hurt.

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability.

If you have some liniment I'll put it on my dignity

Don't be afraid to be afraid.

Maybe our intimacies are more precious if we know they may be taken away.

Why does the joy of love contain so much sadness? We're afraid of the sadness because it grows and spreads and becomes too terrible to be borne. And because it leads to tenderness. Tenderness. The moment of tenderness, the undoing, unbearable moment of tenderness.

When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how.

They're able to live with this kind of intimacy and not be destroyed by it.

Remember that the human brain is a very delicate organism, and it can be easily damaged.

But, like all human beings, she still had unfulfilled longings. She could still be as lonely and frightened as a child, and with as little reason.

Trust easily come by can vanish as easily.

Only a human being can say I'm sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.

One thing I have discovered since I've been ill, though, is that nobody ever knows anybody, and maybe least of all the people who are closest to them. Sort of a business of not being able to see the trees for the woods. We all live in isolated prisons of our own bodies and there's no real contact with any other human being. That's what sex is, in a way, isn't it, a desperate striving for contact? With which cheerful Thought for Today, I will bid you good afternoon.