Quotes About Vulnerability

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow.

He sits in the straight-backed chair next to the bed and lifts a cooling cup of tea. "If you die, what happens to me?" "I don't know," I say honestly. "If I die, I don't even know what happens to me.

Hobbes's Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

No. He is asking us if we can truly bear hearing the story. Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield.

There are real disadvantages to fighting in the nude when one's opponents are dressed, but the greatest problem is psychological. If you can get over the sense of heightened vulnerability, the rest is easy to compensate for.

To see and feel one's beloved naked for the first time is one of life's pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow.

Every once in a while, the darkness was too much. It had been quite some time since I had woken up in the middle of the night and into an abyss of terror. But here I was. ... I couldn't soothe myself. ... But if that person had been accessible to me, I wouldn't have been in the state I was in to begin with. [pp. 195-196]

The more we have at stake, the harder it is to make the leap into writing. The more we think about who's going to read it, what they're going to think, how many copies will be printed, whether this magazine or that magazine will accept it for publication, the further away we are from accomplishing anything alive on the page.

I've learned to be wary of those times when I think I know what I'm doing. I've discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue...

How can I tell her that her lists will not protect her?

I can't stand seeing their sympathy. For years, vital parts of me have been frozen, and since the accident I felt myself thawing, dripping, becoming more human than I can bear.

One afternoon I opened an email from her that included a passage from the work of Pema Chodron, a Buddhist teacher and writer whom I had long admired. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land.

She numbs her feelings, because they are bigger than she is.

She doesn't know how to talk about herself. She is very, very good at telling other people's stories. She is known, as a producer, to be an unusually good reader of scripts when it comes to character and motivation. She has an excellent sense of structure. But her cheeks redden and she stumbles when she tries to share in meetings. It's as if the whole of her life rushes in, and she doesn't know where to begin.

I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard!

I wasn't weak or oversensitive; I was precocious. I didn't have a deficit of strength; I had a deficit of years.

Vulnerability doesn't come after trust—it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet.

Feeling stupid is no fun. But being willing to be stupid—in other words, being willing to risk the emotional pain of making mistakes—is absolutely essential, because reaching, failing, and reaching again is the way your brain grows and forms new connections.

So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in wickedness, till we grow invulnerable by conscience; and that sentinel, once dozed, sleeps fast, not to be awakened while the tide of pleasure continues to flow or till something dark and dreadful brings us to ourselves again.

I have saved your life on no other terms than I would be glad to be saved myself: and it may, one time or other, be my lot to be taken up in the same condition. Besides, said he, when I carry you to the Brazils, so great a way from your own country, if I should take from you what you have, you will be starved there, and then I only take away that life I have given.

Ne poznavaju?i opasnost koja mi prijeti, bio sam jednako sretan kao da je zapravo i nije bilo.

The truth is, if we become comfortable with who we are rather than who we think we should be, then we will be less insecure.

The story of Pi is the story of all of us. We all have tigers under our tarpaulins - tigers that, we feel, could destroy us. We think we want to be rid of our tigers. But the truth is, we would feel a great loss if they ran away, because ultimately, each tiger is part of us.