Quotes About Vulnerability

Besides, those few people who aren't a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.

Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.

I felt that in my strange new friends and in certain new books, I was meeting my other half. Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

See how the fearful chandelier Trembles above you Each time you open your mouth To sing. Sing. —DONALD JUSTICE

What your giving can do is to help your readers be braver, be better than they are, be open to the world again.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding space,' to quote the late, great Zora Neale Hurston. It

What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, "This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I'm going to go hide in the garage

This is a hard planet, and we're a vulnerable species. And all I can do is pray: Help. When

When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope.

Sometimes we have to get cancer or have a heart attack to stop the train of wired meaninglessness, to stop faking or stuffing it all back down.

I did the only thing I know to do. I said it. I told the truth...90% of the time this is the solution. Tell it. Cry if you can. If you can't, sit in a dejected posture hunched over and stay with this a while. It will shift and become less acute.

The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe. JOANNA MACY

If anyone is so good that he or she should be spared, you can safely assume that person is in the line of fire. Fair is where the pony rides are.

Writing: shitty first drafts. Butt in chair. Just do it. You own everything that happened to you. You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart–your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it's why you were born

The old adage is that intimacy means "Into me I see"—deeply, with a flashlight—and believe me, we're not trying to avoid seeing the lovely and selfless aspects of ourselves. It's not even the unlikable qualities—narcissism, fraudulence, envy. It's the really disgusting, uncooked-egg parts of us—wanting people to fail, using people, holding on to resentments, our sense of entitlement.

Hello, Dearest. I'm so glad it's you!" I've come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive.

He started to explain his position, trying to get me to engage. I secretly shut my heart to him completely. I forgot that this hurts only me.

The neck is where it all shows. Like the thighs of the head.

I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed—which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.

Love can bring people out of isolation, get them to take off the Halloween masks they wear, breathing through the slits.

This menagerie - it was part of my being repented - to show up places where I might have been afraid, like the zoo or a marriage.

My parents, teachers, and the culture I grew up in showed me a drawer in which to stuff my merciful nature, because mercy made me look vulnerable and foolish, and it made me less productive. It was distracting to focus worried eyes on others instead of on homework, and on poor Dad, after all he had done for us, and on the prize of making the whole family look good.

So I practice the fifth Get: I get in touch with others. I tell my partner the truth about how crunchy I feel inside, how unevolved or vindictive. Or I pick up the three-hundred-pound phone and tell a close friend. Or I get in the car and head to where one of my precious communities has gathered. This might be a park, my church, my Sunday school room; with hikers, sober people, townsfolk.

How come you can hear a chord, and then another chord, and then your heart breaks open?