Quotes About Vulnerability

You have a cough that won't go away—and then? It's not science you call upon but a doctor. A doctor with good days and bad days. A doctor with a weird laugh and a bad haircut. A doctor with three other patients to see and, inevitably, gaps in what he knows and skills he's still trying to learn.

It requires vigilance over nutrition, medications, and living situations. And it requires each of us to contemplate the unfixable in our life, the decline we will unavoidably face, in order to make the small changes necessary to reshape it. When the prevailing fantasy is that we can be ageless, the geriatrics uncomfortable demand is that we accept we are not.

merely as struggling human beings.

We are all, whatever we do, in the hands of flawed human beings.

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.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.

Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly inferior capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side

I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that poin was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret of not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

may I never lose that terror that keeps me brave

There are many kinds of open. . . Love is a word, another kind of open. . . Take my word for jewel in your open light.

One thing has always kept me going—and it's not really courage or bravery, unless that's what courage or bravery is made of—is that sense that there are so many ways in which I'm vulnerable and cannot help but be vulnerable, I'm not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies' hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder.

Always in the middle of our bloodiest battles you lay down your arms like flowering mines to conqueror me home.

When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills and joint defenses are developed. And if you survive you survive because those skills and defenses have worked. When you come into conflict over other existing differences, there is a vulnerability to each other which is desperate and very deep.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.

Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.

She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous – they suck you in and pretend not to notice.

young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.