Quotes About Vulnerability

Holding Naoko in my arms, I wanted to explain to her, I am having intercourse with you now. I am inside you. But this is really nothing. It doesn't matter. It is nothing but the joining of two bodies. All we are doing is telling each other things that can only be told by the rubbing together of two imperfect lumps of flesh. By doing this, we are sharing our imperfection.

For her, loneliness is something you have others remove for you. And once it's gone, everything's okay. Doesn't go any further. I can't live that way.

There are people who can open their hearts and people who can't. You're one of the ones who can. Or, more precisely, you can if you want to. - What happens when people open their hearts? - They get better.

I might have been afraid that if I really loved someone and needed her, one day she might suddenly disappear without a word, and I'd be left all alone.

People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither if us know anything substantial about the other.

Trouble is we end up being worse at saying things well. It's got to be an inborn fault. Naturally, everyone's got faults. My biggest fault is that the faults i was born with grow bigger each year.

We weren't lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even more deeply than lovers do.

Men who wield great violence at home against their wives and children are invariably people of weak character. They prey upon those who are weaker than themselves precisely because of their own weakness.

It was the first time Junko felt a certain something as she watched the flames of a bonfire: something deep down, a wad of feeling, she might have called it, because it was too raw, too heavy, to real to be called an idea. It coursed through her body and vanished, leaving behind a sweet-sad, chest-gripping, strange sort of feeling.

It was a small soft hand. I thought my heart might break in two.

There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm after. I don't know what my stregths are or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail, the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared, I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.

There's no sense forcing yourself if you don't feel like it. Tell you the truth, I've had sex with lots of guys, but I think I did it mostly out of fear. I was scared not to have somebody putting his arms around me, so I could never say no. That's all. Nothing good ever came of sex like that. All it does is grind down the meaning of life a piece at a time.

He did know: he knew her right away, and he felt known by her, and that was where the trouble really began...She could have been exotic or worldly or a Valkyrie and it would have meant nothing to him. But that Alice saw him?that was a feeling Amos had never experienced before, and it felt like a revelation and also like a virus.

The book was so clean and white, and the letters were so perfectly black and defenseless; it would have been like tearing the ears off a kitten.

There were, in fact, countless things he appreciated about AnnaLee. He liked her wildness, the way she carried herself like a great ship through the world; her grief, and her great mind; the way she listened in church, her strange vulnerability to her mother. She had a resilient, perfectly normal marriage, she was afraid to drive, and she dreamed primarily in smells. She interested him.

Tell him everything and then be quiet and listen

God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.

With menopause, what's considered "normal" vaginal pH changes from a 3.8–4.5 range to higher, usually between 5 and 6, the same level it usually is before puberty, too. That's okay, but it can change our vulnerability to imbalances and infections.

When you're young, sex doesn't mean as much, it isn't sacred. Children make the best prostitutes because they're th emost perfunctory about the whole encounter. The whole act is like a dare, like kissing a frog or something. It's nasty while it's happening, but you forget about it soon afterward. And sometimes it isn't even that nasty. Whatever it is, it's so far from love.

You should beware of motherless children. They will eat you alive. You will never be loved by anyone the way that you will be loved by a motherless child.

I went into the room and sat next to Linus on the bed. I put my hand on his shoulder. I was always surprised at how soft other people were. I thought I felt his heartbeat, although it could have been my own.

Jules and I were tiny people. We were delicate. We were almost destroyed. We were vulnerable. Like nerds in a school yard of bullies, we could have traded our stamps and cards of extinct animals. That's the kind of people we would be if our situation were different.

Being a woman was a trap. Something would bring you down before you were twenty-three. The only time the world shows you any favor, or cuts you any slack, is during that very brief period of courtship where the world is trying to fuck you for the first time.

My body never belonged to me. You must have felt that too. If someone wanted to beat me, they could beat me. If someone wanted to lock me in the closet, they could. Childhood is such a perverse injustice, I don't know how anyone survives it without going crazy. But I have a chance to turn the tables. I have a chance to run the streets and be a wealthy woman. No one is ever, ever, ever going to treat me with disrespect again.