“You can no more make someone tell the truth than you can force someone to love you.”
Vulnerable feeling
Vulnerable Quotes — page 4 of 73
“I’ve had so many knives stuck into me, when they hand me a flower I can’t quite make out what it is. It takes time.”
“Be happy when you are blamed and accused wrongly, for then you have the chance to see all the bitter, hostile or self-pitying responses that your sinful soul wants to spew out - as if these puny things could in any way defend you! Watch and see if any of these poisons come out of you when your spirit is pricked by an accusation. Only then can you see yourself as you are, and confess thy sin that is within you and forsake yourself again into the Lord's care.”
“I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found.”
“As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.”
“At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I'll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.”
“My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.”
“One of the most painfully inauthentic ways we show up in our lives sometimes is saying "yes" when we mean "no," and saying "no" when we mean "hell yes."”
“The thing that you have to understand about those of us in the Black Muslim movement was that all of us believed 100 percent in the divinity of Elijah Muhammad. We believed in him. We actually believed that God, in Detroit by the way, that God had taught him and all of that. I always believed that he believed in himself. And I was shocked when I found out that he himself didn't believe it.”
“I had blind faith in him. My faith in Elijah Muhammad was more blind and more uncompromising than any faith that any man has ever had for another man. And so I didn't try and see him as he actually was.”
“I don't trust anyone who hasn't been self-destructiv e in some way, and who hasn't gone through some sort of bout of self-loathing. You've got to bang yourself around a bit to know yourself.”
“The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.”
“You have so many layers, that you can peel away a few, and everyone's so shocked or impressed that you're baring your soul, while to you it's nothing, because you know you've twenty more layers to go.”
“Forgiveness does not come easily to us, especially when someone we have trusted betrays our trust. And yet if we do not learn to forgive, we will discover that we can never really rebuild trust.”
“Perhaps, I myself am the enemy who needs to be loved.”
“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
“My whole act is confession.”
“As I see it, you are living with something that you keep hidden deep inside. Something heavy. I felt it from the first time I met you. You have a strong gaze, as if you have made up your mind about something. To tell you the truth, I myself carry such things around inside. Heavy things. That is how I can see it in you.”
“My first language was shy. It's only by having been thrust into the limelight that I have learned to cope with my shyness.”
“I’m a black woman who is from Central Falls, Rhode Island. I’m dark skinned. I’m quirky. I’m shy. I’m strong. I’m guarded. I’m weak at times. I’m sensual. I’m not overtly sexual. I am so many things in so many ways and I will never see myself on screen. And the reason I will never see myself up on screen is because that does not translate with being black.”