“Dear God, I am so afraid to open my clenched fists! Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to? Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands? Please help me to gradually open my hands and to discover that I am not what I own, but what you want to give me.”
Vulnerable feeling
Vulnerable Quotes — page 30 of 73
“We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for.”
“I'm sorry that I never trusted you. I don't know how to do that anymore.”
“As a novelist, I suppose I can say that I'm highly articulate. But I know, as a person, in other ways, I'm not always articulate. I think we are all, from time to time, inarticulate, at some level, about some things.”
“What I do is sometimes - at least in Germany - met with wounding campaigns. I always face the question: should I grow myself a thick skin and ignore it, or should I let myself be wounded? I've decided to be wounded, since, if I grew a thick skin, there are other things I wouldn't feel any more.”
“You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.”
“Someone said: "I have been prejudiced against myself from my earliest childhood: hence I find some truth in all blame and some stupidity in all praise. I generally estimate praise too poorly and blame too highly.”
“Self-love is an instrument useful but dangerous; it often wounds the hand which makes use of it, and seldom does good without doing harm.”
“I've done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.”
“What is important in meditation is the quality of the mind and the heart.It is not what you achieve, or what you say you attain, but rather the quality of a mind that is innocent and vulnerable.”
“I was at a restaurant and I heard this little voice at a nearby table pipe up and say, 'I believe I will have the chowder.' I got up and walked out into the middle of the restaurant. There was Sterling Holloway just sitting there being Sterling Holloway. Never in a million years would I have imagined that I'd have the honor of filling his shoes. I just regret not going up to him and saying hello.”
“Writing as a woman presents enormous problems but I have attempted it several times and haven't had many complaints.”
“Most people who have grown up introverted in this very extroverted culture of ours have had painful experiences of feeling like they are out of step with what's expected of them. Parenting can pose unique challenges for introverted parents, who fear that their own painful experiences will be repeated in their children's lives.”
“Reproach is shame, blame, disgrace, disapproval and a disrespectful attitude toward yourself. When you're under reproach, your behavior shows it.”
“Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home. The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all - as well as what she'd be up to in that room of her own.”
“Sometimes I think that I cheated my own family and my closest friends by giving to audiences so much of the love I might have kept for them. But that’s the way I was made; I truly don't think I could help it”
“When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.”
“Dad was the only adult male I ever trusted.”
“Nothing prints more lively in our minds than something we wish to forget.”
“How many times do we pay for one mistake? The answer is a thousand times for the same mistake. The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for ONE mistake. The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake.”