Quotes About Vulnerability

I have found that people want and need to explore this subject in their own lives, that the discussion brings needed relief—to all of us. For we all, being human, have some suicide story in our past or our future.

It's having hope which requires having guts. So wear your heart on your sleeve and if it bleeds, let it, so long as it still beats.

It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong. JOSEPH CHILTON PEARCE

We're human. We all occasionally wet ourselves. No one is really better than anyone else. We're just all trying to make it through the year as best we can. We screw up sometimes. We succeed sometimes. We laugh. We cry. We go on. Those are the things we should really share with each other this holiday season, right, if we dare send a letter? We should share the truth. We should share the insanity.

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to...You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.

It is something—it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle.

Each child marked a decline in the security of their life.

I was pondering the vanity of human wishes and the desperation of human hope, the tooth of time, the vulnerability of good and the unseen omnipresence of evil, and the frailty and passion of life.

By touch we are betrayed, and betray others.

Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

He's splitting me open, I thought. He'll break me and then I'll die.

All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.

Be not ashamed women, ... You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

As Adam early in the morning,Walking forth from the bower refresh'd with sleep,Behold me where I pass, hear my voice, approach,Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass,Be not afraid of my body.

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

If you cannot forgive because of hurt inflicted by others, you will be unwilling to be vulnerable for fear of being hurt again. Because people are sinners, you cannot love and you cannot minister without getting hurt.

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

Greatest risk of all: to be vulnerable, to allow others to see us as we really are