Quotes About Vulnerability

Without shelter, we stand in daylight." "Without shelter, we feel ourselves likely to die.

Willa regretted every failure while she held her daughter and stroked her hair and marveled that mothers' and daughters' hearts can be crushed so repeatedly without learning to defend themselves. She thought of times she'd fallen apart in her own mother's arms, and let herself be put back together.

it's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

It's the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time.

He is the one wife belonging to many white men. Anatole explained it this way: Like a princess in a story, Congo was born too rich for her own good, and attracted attention far and wide from men who desire to rob her blind. The United States has now become the husband of Zaire's economy, and not a very nice one. Exploitive and condescending, in the name of steering her clear of the moral decline inevitable to her nature.

my heart felt like a soft, damaged place in my chest, like a bruise on a peach.

Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she'd use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom's life. And if that's how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I'll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance.

All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel.

People love to believe in danger, as long as it's you in harm's way

I hadn't thought before about how self-sufficiency could turn on you in old age or sickness.

The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?

Guilty or innocent, they have everything to lose. They are what there is to lose. A wife is the earth itself, changing hands, bearing scars.

Estevan took off his shirt and lay back against the front of the boat, his hands clasped behind his head, exposing his smooth Mayan chest to the sun. And to me. How could he possibly have done this, if he had any idea how I felt? I knew that Estevan had walked a long, hard road beyond innocence, but still he sometimes did the most simple, innocent, heartbreaking things.

the all-consuming nothingness and everythingness of an infant.

the bathroom was the boy I can beat up.

Tilting the head to the side is a submission signal because it exposes the throat and neck and makes the person look smaller and less threatening. Its probable origin is in the baby resting its head on its parent's shoulder or chest, and the submissive, nonthreatening meaning it conveys seems to be unconsciously understood by most people, especially women.

begun to comprehend that money did not only buy necessities, but so much else as well. She had come to realize that the possessor of money also possessed power, a most desirable asset to Emma, because she knew now that power made you invulnerable. It made you safe. By the same token, Emma had come to bitterly accept the fact that there was no justice or liberty for the poor.

Why him?He was as likely to offer me security and safety as a violent terrorist holding a gun to my head.So why I had chosen him?Because he had charmed me into a love affair,had truly convinced me he was madly in love with me.

Between her hand over my heart and her hips at my crotch, she might as well have been administering a polygraph.

Then she reached lower and started to ease my pants down. I stopped her so I could get my shoes and socks off first. Pants-pooled-at-the-ankles is too helpless a posture for me.

I've gotten used to hoping for so little that I seem to have lost any natural immunity to the emotion's infection.

Now it was "our purpose," something she taught her women's self-defense students to recognize as "forced teaming," when a person suggests he has something in common with his intended victim to get her to drop her guard.

Both women had been wearing earbuds—one of the many things Livia taught her self-defense students never to do, because demonstrating both that you can't hear and that you're too naïve to know better is a beacon to predators.