Quotes About Vulnerability

Mom just loved people. Part of this might have come from never wanting to be alone, where she could only brood over Pop. Part of it must have come from her fears for me. She knew she wouldn't be around for very long to take care of me. There was damn little she could do to protect me after she was gone. All she had was me. All I had was her.

When I sing it, it affects me so much I get sick. It takes all the strength out of me.

My childhood ended around the time of my ninth birthday, shamed into sex, obedience and fear.

But my heart is always propped up in a field on its tripod, ready for the next arrow.

I thanked everyone whose job it ever was to lay hands on the skin of strangers, and I gave general thanks that I was lying facedown in a warm puddle of soap and not a warm puddle of blood in some corner of this incomprehensible city.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe There was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

C++ protects against accident, not against fraud.

The greatest and most important thing in the world is founded on weakness. This is a remarkably sure foundation, for nothing is surer than that the people will be weak.

L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'éraser: un vapeur, un goutte d'eau suffit pout le tuer. Mais, quand l'univers l'écraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, pare qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien.

Pride counterbalances all these miseries; man either hides or displays them, and glories in his awareness of them.

What astonishes us most is to observe that everyone is not astonished at his own weakness.

The human heart is hard to grasp.

A poem is a naked person....Some people say that I am a poet.

I love how intimate I've become with failure.

The wise will go upstairs, undo buttons and hair, fold themselves within the covenant of flesh and make love wilder than any weather. — Bob Hicok, from "Weather," The Legend of Light (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)

scrawny neck.

A man can think he's invincible, but Father Time has a way of putting him in his place.

He had expected political protection from his attorney general and was now left unprotected.

Smith liked to think of Donald Trump as a hundred-year flood in American democracy. But he told colleagues there was nothing Congress could put into law to protect the country if a lunatic wound up in the White House. The war-making power was ceded to the president as commander in chief. The only power Congress had, in a practical sense, was to cut off the money. He believed the system for controlling the use of nuclear weapons was vulnerable.

an adversary was the most dangerous when they were frightened and believed they might be attacked.

When we feel that all eyes are upon on us, it is often difficult to take chances in expressing our individuality.

He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore had a short temper, which is why he went straight after everything with an ax...

Over time, any deception destroys intimacy, and without intimacy couples cannot have true and lasting love.

It is impossible to meet God without abandon, without exposing yourself, being raw.