Quotes About Vulnerability

Listen, mate, everybody gets scared, and anybody says he don't is a damn liar.

Trust, like Christ-like love, is to be extended not because others deserve it but because they need it, because they can become trustworthy (or loving) by being nurtured in a community of trust and love. We need to extend trust, even if doing so makes us vulnerable to pain and great cost, in order to save our own souls.

I'm bankrupt without love.

Any understanding of God that doesn't take into account God's silence is a half truth — in effect, a cruel distortion — and leaves us vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation by leaders who are quite willing to fill in the biblical blanks with what the Holy Spirit never tells us.

We do not become less needy, less dependent when we pray; we become more needy, more dependent, which is to say, more human.

Nobody has ever seen a dragon, but everybody (especially children) knows they exist. Dragons are projections of our fears, horrible constructions of all that might hurt us. A dragon is total evil. A peasant confronted by a magnificent dragon is completely outclassed. There is no escape: the dragon's thick skin, fiery mouth, lashing serpentine tail, and insatiable greed and lust sign an immediate doom.

And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily--open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.

The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards -- and even then I have my doubts.

A crying baby is the purest expression of the inanity of being human.

A newborn's immune system is underdeveloped, which is convenient because it allows for colonization by Mom's bacteria, but it's also why young children are prone to infection.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks and so may no one touch you who loves you.

I wake up afraid that she will be taken and folded up in a closet like clean linen.

many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children

I'm afraid something will happen to my hands," he says, "I need my hands.

He is someone who believes he can break things, or he believes that anything can hurt him.

My mother was in the bathtub crying and I was standing outside the door waiting, just in case she decided to slip her head under and keep it there. The other kids were upstairs. The problem was about money, of course. She was afraid she wouldn't have enough for us to eat.

tell me how does it feel with my teeth in your heart!

I'm worried because of my mother, she's going to see my performance and she's quite hard. She's going to see me naked. And my Dad, woah. Yeah, they're going to see me like a woman, you know?

Once the hag got upset she was apt to go downhill very fast and remember things like she was an orphan. People are often orphans when they are eighty-two, but it is true that when you have no mother or father you can feel very lonely at any age.

It is a fearful thing to love what time can touch.

The man holding me had a pistol in his other hand; I saw it in the comer of my eye just before I felt its cold hardness crunch into my temple; pressed against my face, the pistol was hard in a way that seemed absolute, bone-smashing, beyond argument, and cold in a way that seemed perfect and permanent;

and I was thinking of what it would be like to have such a wound, to lift up the bottom of my shirt at school and have bandages to show, white brushstrokes on belly, when a horrendous force Huhhh catapulted me forward and my neck whipped back and I crumbled down to the pavement and my entire face began to cry;

Instead of healing the past with words, he and Helen had reached a point where words were suddenly too dangerous to be used.

Helen felt her face flush. She discovered that she could not meet Dane's gaze. As long as he did not look at her, she was all right. Even while she was touching him, massaging the muscles of his back, she could control her response to him. But now, when she tried to look into the eyes that mirrored his soul, she flinched.