Quotes About Vulnerability

Giovanni looked at me. And this look made me feel that no one in my life had ever looked at me directly before.

Terrifying, that the loss of intimacy with one person results in the freezing over of the world, and the loss of oneself! And terrifying that the terms of love are so rigorous, its checks and liberties so tightly bound together.

I do not know what I would do if you left me. For the first time I felt the suggestion of a threat in his voice—or I put it there. I have been alone so long—I do not think I would be able to live if I had to be alone again.

He had been bruised, so to speak, so badly that the eyes of strangers lacerated him like salt.

Women don't see men the way men want to be seen. They see all the tender places, all the places where blood could flow.

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. And, after all, one can give freedom only by setting someone free.

Ah! she said, men may be at the mercy of women?I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular man is ever at the mercy of a particular woman ?why, he's somehow stopped being a man.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst.

It does seem - well, difficult - to be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself.

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

He held my face between his hands and I suppose 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 strange insistent gentleness on the mouth.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up. All of it, the literal and the fanciful.

Now, for the first time, I began to be aware of my heart, the heart itself: and with this awareness, conscious terror came. I realized that I knew nothing whatever about the way we are put together; and I realized that what I did not know might be in the process of killing me.

But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.

For a woman,' she said, 'I think a man is always a stranger. And there's something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.

I could not stop talking, though I feared at every instant that I would say too much. Perhaps I wanted to say too much.

You said once, he said, that you wanted to grow. Isn't that always frightening? Doesn't it always hurt?

One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.

But the fact that I had said it as he held my hand made it sound to me unutterably helpless and soft and coy.

He was sobbing, it would have been said, as though his heart would break.

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.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace