Quotes About Vulnerability

But, when the chips are down, its better to be furious with someone you love, or frightened for someone you love, than be put through the merciless horror of being ashamed of someone you love.

No one is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

All art is a kind of confession.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself -- that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced.

Sometimes, when he was not near me, I thought, I will never let him 'Touch' me again. Then, when he 'Touched' me, I thought, it doesn't matter, it is only the body, it will soon be over. When it was over, I lay in the dark and listened to his breathing and dreamed of the 'Touch' of hands, of Giovanni's hands, or anybody's hands, hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

A real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things that can be named.

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless.

One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself - that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving

I kissed her salty tears and murmured, murmured I don't know what. I felt her body straining, straining to meet mine and I felt my own contracting and drawing away and I knew that I had begun the long fall down.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker, said Giovanni, as though he had not heard me, and so you can stand less and less.

one day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find.

she was disquietingly fluid—fluid without, however, being able to flow. I felt a hardness and a constriction in her, a grave mistrust, created already by too many men like me ever to be conquered now.

If you look helpless, people react to you in one way and if you look strong, or just come on strong, people react to you in another way, and, since you don't see what they see, this can be very painful.

San?r?m iki insan?n hem gülmesi hem seviÅŸmesi, güldükleri için seviÅŸmeleri ve seviÅŸtikleri için gülmeleri pek az rastlan?r bir durumdur. Sevmek ve gülmek hep ayn? yerden gelir de, o noktaya pek çok kiÅŸi eriÅŸemez.

Love forces, at last, this humility: you cannot love if you cannot be loved, you cannot see if you cannot be seen.

They are just dirty, all of them, low and cheap and dirty.' He stretched out his hand and pulled me down to the floor beside him. 'All except you. Tous, sauf toi.' He held my face between his hands and I supposed such tenderness has scarcely ever produced such terror as I then felt. 'Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t'en prie,' he said, and kissed me, with a strange insistent gentleness on the mouth.

A child cannot, thank Heaven, know how vast and how merciless is the nature of power, with what unbelievable cruelty people treat each other. He reacts to the fear in his parents' voices because his parents hold up the world for him and he has no protection without them.

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced...Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self...

His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body's power over me.

And my mind was empty—or it was as though my mind had become one enormous, anaesthetized wound. I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry

And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up.