Quotes about Vulnerability

For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the next one.

Well, that's the way it was. Nobody counted on Garner dying. Nobody though he could. How 'bout that? Everything rested on Garner being alive. Without his life each of theirs fell to pieces. Now ain't that slavery or what is it?

You have to understand that, Lord. You said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and harm them not. Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sit on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I've seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God.

I've had only two regular women. I liked the small breakable thing inside each one. Whatever their personality, smarts, or looks, something soft lay inside each. Like a bird's breastbone, shaped and chosen to wish on. A little V, thinner than bone and lightly hinged, that I could break with a forefinger if I wanted to, but never did. Want to, I mean. Knowing it was there, hiding from me, was enough.

Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister's comb beating in him.

Any time we turn to the devil's devices to solve the issues of our soul, we step out from under the umbrella of God's protection and become vulnerable to the elements. Freedom comes, as I shared in the story above, by breaking these covenants through verbally renouncing each one of them. When these contracts are destroyed, our enemy loses the legal right to oppress us.

A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other a horse still.

In a man's letters his soul lies naked.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Sorrow makes us all children again.