Quotes About Vulnerability

Maybe I'm growing up, Thomas'. But there were tears in his voice, and he looked younger than he had ever done.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm

He was no longer an orphan, but finding out who his real father was made him feel as if he were standing naked in an icy wind, at night, with no shelter - a wind that would never stop blowing until the day he died

How little you know how you've kept my balance.

To love is to be ready to lose, it's not to have, to keep.

Bilbo uttered a frightened cry, started to kick and squirm. But Ed lifted him from the floor, held him helpless in his powerful grip. Bilbo's body now formed a shield against the guns of Hone and Kranz.

I'm not sure how I see things anymore," Mitch said. "Having your body jerked around by nature is sobering. Women experience it more directly, but this has got to be a first for the men.

A man would rather be trampled by elephants on fire than tell you he's just not that into you.

There are always people you care about," he said. "You just don't realize how much until a bad man points a gun at them. Or until they leave…

Because I expected so little, Gaines's painting is startlingly powerul. A lank-haired blond woman with a hard face sits at akitchen table in the harsh light of a bare bulb. She's surrounded by dirty cereal bowls and fast-food bags, and her shirt is open to the waist, revealing small sagging breasts. Her hollow eyes look out from the canvas with the sullen resignation of an animal that has helped build its own cage.

Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughter's eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors I've most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in their façades, and tired feet of clay—or worse.

We're all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us.

At least fifty people are sitting or standing within sight of me. The oldest ones sit on their stoops beneath dented metal awnings. The middle-aged stand in little knots, the men sharing bottles wrapped in paper sacks, the women holding babies. I don't see any teenagers—it's as though they've been drafted for some special war—but several toddlers walk unsupervised through the parking lot. Three of them are naked.

Albert didn't know how that skinny school teacher could take what Willie gave her. But that was another thing he'd learned over the years; the size of the woman on the outside didn't mean nothing. It was how much hunger she had on the inside that made her what she was between the sheets.

She steps inside my proffered hand and draws me to her in a one-armed hug that lasts long enough for me to learn that she's been drinking gin without much tonic and that her breasts are not original architecture.

I don't know why the water and the sky scare me. I wonder if it is because here at the ocean there is no place to hide.

I thought that being with someone who seemed to love me was better than being alone.

I think it worked like any abusive relationship . . . a person feels trapped, nowhere to go . . . they are abused and then the abuser reins them back in with kindness and the person being abused settles, not quite thinking about the next time they are beat etc. just relieved the abuse is over (for now).

Nothing makes a person feel worse than knowing you've inspired pity. It's a knife in the chest. A scalpel across the neck.

And since you've never talked about it, you don't know even how to really frame your thoughts. You fear that your words will tumble out in a way that will only make things worse.

When you have something that you carry inside and never talk about, you don't ever unleash it on a stranger. And since you've never talked about it, you don't know even how to really frame your thoughts. You fear that your words will tumble out in a way that will only make things worse. If that's even possible.

We were never anything more than something she could manipulate

When you have something that you carry inside and never talk about, you don't ever unleash it on a stranger. And since you've never talked about it, you don't know even how to really frame your thoughts. You fear that your words will tumble out in a way that will only make things worse.

Sami told her about the abuse that had been going on. All that she'd missed. How Tori was locked in a dog kennel and sprayed with a hose. The nudity. The withholding of food. And Ron Woodworth. "She did the same thing to Kathy, Nikki.