Quotes About Vulnerability

Sometimes this human stuff is slimy and pathetic—jealousy especially so—but better to feel it and talk about it and walk through it than to spend a lifetime being silently poisoned.

I have a quote taped to my office wall from an anonymous source that says, 'Love is hard. Love is ... seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.

Rilke wrote: "I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

tucked his hands under his thighs as if they had to be contained, as if they would lash out otherwise, or fly away.

A critic is someone who comes onto the battlefield after the battle is over and shoots the wounded"?

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see that bleak, unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words -- not just any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

we won't love you if you're perfect

I can't save a boy from a burning building. Instead he must save me from the attempt; he must jump to earth.

The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass; husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes.

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. All these and other factors combined, if the circumstances are right, can teach and can lead to rebirth.

You deliberately don't ask the questions to which you would rather not know the answers. You call it trust. You know too late that it is cowardice.

In that moment there was no pretense between them, no lingering vestige of reserve or attempt to escape, no denial. It was final and complete.

His face crumpled a little. It was highly expressive, mirroring his thoughts and feelings more than he wished.

there was something extraordinarily sweet and comfortable about a friend who knows you and accepts you at your worst, your most bitter, or defeated, who sees your emotional ugliness naked and is not afraid to call it by name, and yet does not turn from you or allow you to cease to struggle, who wills your survival as precious.

We can become so cruel and so selfish when we are afraid.

Without law, who will protect the mother and child who are tomorrow's strength? Who will protect the geniuses of the mind, the inventor, the artist who enriches the world but has not the power of money or physical ability to defend himself? Who will protect the wise who are old, and might fall victim to the powerful and foolish? Indeed who will protect the strong from themselves?

She despised cowardice, and yet here she was on the brink of it herself.

Many people desire no more than a convention— the sharing of a home, a social position, children, and the wider family; they do not wish to share their thoughts or their leisure, above all they do not wish to reveal their inner selves, where dreams are held, where they may be known, and thus wounded. They will not take risks. In the end there is no generosity of soul, only safety. There is no giving where there may be cost.

It is not good for a woman to be alone," the vicar said grimly. He had a large, squarish face with a strong, thin mouth and heavy nose. He must have been quite fine as a young man. Charlotte was ashamed of how deeply she disliked him. One should not feel that way about a man of the Church. "It leaves her vulnerable to all kinds of dangers," he went on.

The very ill have little privacy, even for the most intimate of things.

I do not wish to be protected from life. I think we might miss a great deal more of the good, and the bad would find us anyway. At least the sense of emptiness would. I think I would rather eat something unpleasant now and then, than perish of starvation sitting at the table because I was afraid to try.

la debilidad era peligrosa. Quienes eran conscientes de sus desventajas eran quienes atacaban. Alguien

Hester, recently married herself, and knowing the depth and the sweep of love, ached for Callandra that she sacrificed so much. And yet loving her husband as she did, for all his faults and vulnerabilities, Hester, too, would rather have been alone than accept anyone else.

When you trust no one and believe in nothing, you are vulnerable to anything, and yet in some ways also to nothing. He was still learning what it was to belong irrevocably, not to be able to walk away because the ties are too deep, too woven into who you are, who you want and need to be, where all that is comfortable and precious resides.