Quotes About Vulnerability

Mary nevertheless marvelled at another otherwise strong man being reduced by a pretty woman. What was there about the male character that could produce great strength of personality, yet equally great weakness when it came to females?

Sometimes people have a lot to lose by telling stories in certain ways, so they work very hard to hide the things that don't fit with their views of themselves,

You know, Liz, I really got how women can just slip away when they bleed like that. I was already so high from the birth, and it would have been really easy just to check out completely. It was the coziest, warmest, most delicious feeling—it just felt so good." I never forgot this, as only then did I fully appreciate how firmly and passionately the midwife must tell the hemorrhaging mother to stay present.

I felt like one who wants to trap and cage a little bird, and after years of waiting and luring and baiting finds that she must do no more than hold out her hand, and the finch lands on her finger and does not fly. You scarcely dare to move. It rests on your hand whole and free, foolishly trusting and infinitely courageous. It will never be more beautiful.

The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered. We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human.

A man must at times be hard as nails: willing to face up to the truth about himself, and about the woman he loves, refusing compromise when compromise is wrong. But he must also be tender. No weapon will breach the armor of a woman's resentment like tenderness.

Kenric grabbed her arms and pulled her closer, shaking her once. "I've told you it will make no difference! Why are you doing this?" "Because I love you," she whispered brokenly. Those were the words. Of any she could have said to him, those were the only ones that could crumble his defenses. He'd heard them too often in his mind, certain she would never think to use them as a weapon. They sliced through him as cleanly as the sharpest knife.

I found out myself long ago that there's no one whom one dislikes so much as the person in whom one's confided too much.

Friendship can only survive on a sound basis of ignorance.

You tell yourself to someone and they steal your soul. That's why I don't talk to anybody.

Tis a strange thing, that the only friends I have I found in the same way, lying flat in the meadows, crying as if their hearts would break.

Sureness is something like a neck brace, which we clamp around our lives, hoping to somehow protect ourselves from the frightening, constant whiplash of change. Sadly, the brace doesn't always hold.

This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.

There's a crack (or cracks) in everyone…that's how the light of God gets in.

He knocked his pipe out. His paper rustled to the floor and his spectacles slid own his nose. His hands, red and shiny, lay relaxed on his knee. He abandoned himself to the quietness and the warmth of sun and fire. Autumn was a strange paradoxical time of the year. It was the season when he was happiest and yet it was the season when he was most vulnerable and most aware, and that was not always a happiness. Yet he liked autumn.

She lived too close to despair to have any strength left for self-knowledge. She might have been able to acknowledge herself unloved but to know herself unloving was beyond her strength.

Fear is a lonely thing. Even those who love us best cannot get close to us when we are afraid.

The small children and the very old, with the stuff of life hardly yet grasped or perforce nearly relinquished, were protected and secure and could enjoy their dreams and illusions immune from the daily wear and tear. And how lucky they were!

Folks don't fall from laughter to fear in that way when they're nervously strong, and nerves take their toll of the body in the end.

Such a blow breaks a weak woman, twists a strong one.

now her compassion had been pierced and set flowing; it felt as though her life's blood were running away.