Quotes About Vulnerability

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She took long showers every night, swimming in the water rushing over her and washing her hair till it squeaked when she ran her hands down it, parents sighing why do you have to be so clean? It was like she knew, in a way. Like that water was grace and soon she would not be able to find it. Soon nothing would make her more than what she was. Nothing would make her whole.

I lied to Julia, I didn't know what else to do because you - you make me feel..." I had to stop. Not because I didn't have words. I did. But I was afraid to say them. He looked at me, and I knew then I could love him. That if I let myself I would. "You make me feel too," he said, and held out one hand.

And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it. For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.

How can she walk through the streets, so vulnerable, so unknowing, and not have people and dogs and perpetual calamity following her? But overhung with her vines of faith, she is protected from their gaze like the pools in Epping Forest. I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injury only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.

I feel helpless, hopeless, too low to call out, too weak to think. Impotent tears dribble down.

Swearing invulnerably, I measure mercilessly his shortcomings, and with luxurious scorn, ask who could be ensnared there.

She knows that loneliness can kill people - in different ways can actually make you die. (68)

And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been a time when she'd felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist's gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes.

He looked at the books, and she wanted to say, 'Stop that,' as though he were reading her diary.

But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make.

Grief is such a—oh, it is such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think. It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you.

God, Olive, you're a difficult woman. You are such a goddamn difficult woman, and fuck all, I love you. So if you don't mind, Olive, maybe you could be a little less Olive with me, even if it means being a little more Olive with others. Because I love you, and we don't have much time.

His blue eyes were watching her now; she saw in them the vulnerability, the invitation, the fear, as she sat down quietly, placed her open hand on his chest, felt the thump, thump of his heart, which would someday stop, as all hearts do. But there was no someday now.

They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil.

So often I had the private image of William and me as Hansel and Gretel. Two small kids lost in the woods, looking for the breadcrumbs that could lead us home. ... Being with Hansel, even if we were lost in the woods, made me feel safe.

She could hear in the darkness of her car how his breathing was quicker now; and her own was, too. She wanted to say their hears were too old for this now; you can't keep doing this to a heart, can't keep expecting your heart to pull through.

Mensen zijn eenzaam, dat wil ik hier maar mee zeggen. Veel mensen kunnen niet tegen degenen die ze goed kennen zeggen wat ze misschien wel zouden willen zeggen.

We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world.

What she could not possibly have known was that even as I stood before all those people and read and answered questions, I still felt oddly—but very truly—invisible.

Unspeakably frightened. It had unmoored him.

God, I'm scared,' he said, quietly. She almost said, 'Oh, stop. I hate scared people.

the young, he thought, could withstand the rigors of love.

It had made me draw back just slightly inside myself. And I knew this was because I had always been afraid of giving off that odor myself.

I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker.