Quotes About Vulnerability

The feeling you are afraid to feel is running your life

No one can be fearless alone

Many human beings say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it. For them there is no winter food problem. They have fires and warm clothes. The winter cannot hurt them and therefore increases their sense of cleverness and security. For birds and animals, as for poor men, winter is another matter. Rabbits, like most wild animals, suffer hardship.

Dangerous thing, a name. Someone might catch hold of you by it, mightn't they?

If you want to bless me you can bless my bottom, for it is sticking out of the hole.

back to the hollow in the middle of the field. As he waited, Hazel realized more fully than ever how dangerous was their position, without holes, wandering in country they did not know.

My courage— my spirit: it's so much less than it was. I'm afraid to let you rely on me.

I feel as dry and empty as an autumn puffball— I feel as though the wind could blow my fur away.

Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world.

He's changing. Every day more remote, protected, distant. He builds fests now for the soulmate he hasn't found, bricking wall and maze and mountain fortress, dares her to find him at the hidden center of them all Here's an A in self-protection from the one in the world he might love and who might someday love him.

Ich war gerade nahe daran, zu erkennen, daß man jeden durchschauen kann, wenn man einen Knüppel oder Schraubenzieher hat, der groß genug ist.

And if a collection of bad cells no bigger than a walnut could destroy all those things, those things that are so personal that they can never be properly articulated, so personal you hardly dared admit their existence to yourself, what did that leave? How could you trust life again? How could you see it as anything more meaningful than a Saturday night demolition derby?

Are you decent? Richards asked. Yes! she stormed. isn't that why you picked on me? Because I was defenseless and... decent?... If you're so decent, how come you have six thousand New Dollars to buy this fancy car while my little girls dies of flu?

Ich hatte Angst«, sagte er. »Leute, die keine haben, sterben jung«

You're not fooling anyone by taking your clothes off when you go to bed.

Deer Tracks: Beautiful, sobbing high-geared fucking and then to lie silently like deer tracks in the freshly-fallen snow beside the one you love. That's all.

A Threat to Humanity

It is in our lowest moods, when we are least equipped to do so, that we are tempted to try to solve problems or resolve issues with others.

Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.

Reporters go through four stages in a war zone. In the first stage, you're Superman, invincible. In the second, you're aware that things are dangerous and you need to be careful. In the third, you conclude that math and probability are working against you. In the fourth, you know you're going to die because you've played the game too long. I was drifting into stage three.

And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.

What is it about falling? He died of a fall. The poor thing never recovered after his fall. He broke his hip in a fall and was never the same. Death came relatively quickly after a fall in the back yard. How fucking far do these people fall? Off of buildings? Over spamming cataracts? Down manholes? Is it farther to the ground than it used to be?