Quotes About Vulnerability

It's easy to fall in love. The hard part is finding someone to catch you.

At night when they prepared for bed Freda removed all her clothes and lay like a great fretful baby, majestically dimpled and curved. Brenda wore her pajamas and her underwear and a tweed coat—that was the difference between them.

For all his worldliness he was shocked. He was afraid she was becoming corrupted. He had only to suggest she lift her hips a fraction higher or arch her back rather more sharply for her to comply at once. She began to add certain embellishments of her own. On their third night she ordered him quite roughly to bring his legs closer together and found a way of rubbing herself against his knee while sucking at his neck that made him shudder.

That was the trouble of being old. Your body no longer obeyed you. It did unruly and unreasonable things. An eye suddenly might not see for a moment. Your knees gave out at the wrong time, so that when you thought you were walking north, you might find yourself going a little northwest. Your brain, too, had that same flighty trick. You might be speaking of something and forget it temporarily,—your mind going off at a little to the northwest, too, so to speak.

Motherhood makes you stronger even as it makes you weaker. Your new sensitivity is a strength, and you should see it that way.

It's really hard for me to sometimes put myself out there, like 'Hey, how do you feel about making music together?' because maybe I'm afraid of rejection or I don't want to put anybody out. It's the Southerner in me, like, 'I don't mean to bother you but do you mind making a song?'

I wondered if I'd ever be so lucky to have a girlfriend I'd grow old with, a girlfriend who knew my secrets, my fears, my hopes-- and loved me anyway.

A bare lightbulb flickered and buzzed near the ceiling, and the odors of old age and despair spilled from the open doorways. Though I tried to keep my eyes set on the floor in front of me, I couldn't help taking a sideways glance into some of the rooms. One old lady with deep-suffering eyes reached her hand through the metal rails surrounding her bed, spread her bony fingers, and begged me to take her home. It was the saddest five seconds of my life.

Step out from behind the words. When you're a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they're not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

Teaching memoir is teaching vulnerability is teaching voice is teaching self.

Because sentences are for making," I finally said. "Sentences are the risks we take.

A memoir is never right. Nor is the memoirist.

You think of the courage it takes to be anyone at all and anyone, especially, on the page.

Satan never wastes a fiery dart on an area covered in armor.

I have to be in a relationship where I can say what I feel even if it's wrong - so we can work through it.

The softening of her resolve was devastating to her, but she could not shrink from him again and live with herself. She understood all too clearly that it took more courage to stay and face him and the unknown, unexplored part of her than it took to leave. Aaren

I shoved my feet under the sheets and against her thigh until she fell off the bed onto the floor. That was another thing she had taught me: that when you love someone, you must jokingly mistreat them, just a little. It makes it easier when you leave them, or they die.

I hadn't been able to trust since the age of four. I was torn between wanting to be cradled and telling the world to go fuck itself, and those were opposite sides of the same coin.

Just remember that this relationship is based on mutual trust and respect, so never reveal your true self.

Chances are you have a deep connection to books because at some point you discovered that they were the one truly safe place to discover and explore feelings that are banished from the dinner table, the cocktail party, the golf foursome, the bridge game. Because the writers who mattered to you have dared to say I am a sick man. And because within the world of books there is no censure.

never leave a loved one with an angry countenance. Anything could happen in seconds, and how would a person feel if something happened to a dear one, and you had last spoken to him or her in anger.

Old age ain't no place for sissies.

I would rather have a go at something I feel, and be hurt, than always be protecting myself—that way one does not really live.

All I know is that growing up hurts too much. Growing down is what I'd really like to do. Be little enough again so it would be perfectly natural to be protected from the wind and the rain—and the world.