Quotes About Vulnerability

The complete absence of a desire to please, or to put someone at their ease, could, in a less vulnerable person, have been construed as arrogance. In her it came across as a kind of reckless aloneness.

The moth on Rahel's heart lifted a downy leg. Then put it back. Its little leg was cold. A little less her mother loved her.

For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals—from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly—but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore.

You know, there's this phase of people's lives in which they can't really cope on their own, and we ought to find a way to make it manageable.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life--to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.

even children are permitted to take more risks than the elderly.

One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.

And for a moment—only a moment, mind you—I felt my confidence slip.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently. We do not like to think about this eventuality. As a result, most of us are unprepared for it. We rarely pay more than glancing attention to how we will live when we need help until it's too late to do much about it.

Do we ever say that we need them to agree to it anyway? I've never seen it. Given the stakes, who in their right mind would agree to be practiced upon?

We end up with institutions that address societal goals-from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly-but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves

For this reason, doctors are seldom outraged when the press reports yet another medical horror story. They usually have a different reaction: That could be me.

It may seem odd that such a person would place herself in front of a camera.

It seemed as if, once aging led to debility, it was impossible for anyone to be happy. *

We had no backup plan should disaster have occurred.

People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good.

LOU SANDERS WAS on his way to joining the infantilized and catatonic denizens belted into the wheelchairs of a North Andover nursing home

People may hate being embarrassed and strive not to show it when they are, but embarrassment serves an important good. For, unlike sadness or anger or even love, it is fundamentally a moral emotion

It's easy to hide in a statement. It's hard to hide between statements," Cook said.

She felt as if she were a helpless child.

Nonetheless, as the defects in a complex system increase, the time comes when just one more defect is enough to impair the whole, resulting in the condition known as frailty. It happens to power plants, cars, and large organizations. And it happens to us: eventually, one too many joints are damaged, one too many arteries calcify. There are no more backups.

Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need.