Quotes About Vulnerability

People think they know what you're feeling. What you must be feeling. And because it's easier not to expose yourself, what you're truly feeling, you don't disabuse them. You go through the motions for them.

Sam felt more and more that there was no room for him to be who he really was with Claire.

He'd taught her something tonight. Taught her almost painlessly. Almost. She'd thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn't a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with. She felt small, and foolish, exposed.

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I'd be a bad bet even if there there no Annie, Rosemary. I would have been. I'm just not good at saying no. I want–I always want to say yes. And I want to want to say yes. To everything. I'm a greedy person. More or less bottomlessly hungry.' He thinks of babies again.

Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.

It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.

I felt like I'd unzipped my skin and momentarily stepped out of it, leaving a crazy person in charge

I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.

He heard the quake that lived at my center, and he didn't seek to silence it.

She was wet with my crying. Up around her collar the cotton of her dress was plastered to her skin. I could see her darkness shining through the wet places. She was like a sponge, absorbing what I couldn't hold anymore.

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray's mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother--that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?

Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies.

I couldn't be angered by her deceit-it didn't come from treachery. We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

She didn't say, Come on now, stop your crying, everything's going to be okay, which is the automatic thing people say when they want you to shut up. She said, 'It hurts, I know it does. Let it out. Just let it out.' So I did. With my mouth pressed against her dress, it seemed like I drew up my whole lifeload of pain and hurled it into her breast, heaved it with the force of my mouth, and she didn't flinch.

I didn't see why loving someone had to have so much agony attached to it. It felt like a series of fresh cuts in the skin of my heart

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache. I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants – for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that's just my opinion.

There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so carefully.

I'd thought of my aunt as invincible, impervious—someone assailed by life, but somehow unmaimed by it—but I saw her suddenly as a person of flaws and bruises like myself. There was an odd relief in it.