Quotes About Vulnerability

I think it's very important for the male homosexual to recognize that he is a sexual target for other men, and that is why he is despised, and why he is called a faggot. He is called a faggot because other males need him.

You don't know what he means by friendship but you have the feeling it may not be safe. You are afraid it may change you. What kind of friendship have you had?

Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets. And this means that one negro, if he wishes, can knock the other's hustle, can give his game away.

I see his legs buckle, his thighs jelly, the buttocks quiver, the secret hammer there begins to knock.

I thought only, One day I'll weep for this. One of these days I'll start to cry.

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.

I was trembling. I thought, if I do not open the door at once and get out of here, I am lost. But I knew I could not open the door, I knew it was too late; soon it was too late to do anything but moan. He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

He had been been patting his handkerchief between his palms; now he opened his handkerchief and reached out and wiped my forehead. You're all I've got, he said then, with a shy, pained grin. Be careful. Daddy, I said. And began to cry. And if speaking had been agony, this was worse and yet I could not stop. And my father's face changed. It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely helplessly young ... Don't cry, he said, don't cry.

I felt in her marvellously living body the possibility of legitimate surrender.

I walked over to her and put my head on her breast. I wanted to lie there, hidden and still.

He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once, saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck.

It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

his eyes, behind his glasses, were like the eyes of a dying man who looks everywhere for healing.

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

To defend oneself against a fear is simply to insure that one will, one day, be conquered by it; fears must be faced. As for one's wits, it is just not true that one can live by them – not, that is, if one wishes really to live.

hands which would have the power to crush me and make me whole again.

Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together—whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me.

Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,' [...] 'and so you can stand less and less.

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.

Giovanni," I said, helplessly, "be careful. Please be careful." He gave me an ironical smile. "Thank you," he said. "You should have given me that advice the night we met.

I feel that I want to be forgiven; I want her to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half-grown boy, naked before his mother.

But for power truly to feel itself menaced, it must somehow sense itself in the presence of another power—or, more accurately, an energy—which it has not known how to define and therefore does not really know how to control.

Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. You don't know where it'll carry you, and it's a terrifying thing, love. It's the only possibility but it's terrifying.

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.