Quotes About Vulnerability

2. Fear comes from our concealing. Any time we conceal something major under the hood of our lives, fear is allowed to flourish. This is the pattern: We make mistakes. We sin. But we don't confess. Mostly because we feel embarrassed. Or we feel ashamed. Or we don't want to be thought of as anything less than perfect.

the footprints of two of my own Goliaths: control and approval.

Love is made by two people, in different kinds of solitude. It can be in a crowd, but in an oblivious crowd.

you sleep naked in my brain and I dare not rest

Once somebody's aware of a plot, it's like a bone sticking out. If it breaks through the skin, it's very ugly.

The whole thing is so degrading! That a man like Eric should be reduced to crawling before those bloodsuckers who are taking every advantage of his weakened state. And strip himself of one whole third of his wealth to throw it away like all the huge sums they've already got out of him!

And Clara was devastated. She had as yet grown no hedge around the little rose garden of her extreme sensibility; she was still absurdly vulnerable. She

Reward systems, such as those mediated by dopamine, also destabilize during adolescence in order to allow for the creation of new attachments, behaviors, and goals. This search for purpose and meaning makes adolescents more vulnerable to good and bad social influences

It's because his wife left him. That's why he's acting funny. She left him the other night. While she was putting her bags into the taxi he was outside on the footpath begging her to stay. On his knees! Why are men so embarrassing? Bev

Op de slaapkamer sloten we voor alle veiligheid en vuiligheid de deur af, want je kàn nooit weten. Daar kleedde ook hij zich helemaal uit, als een naakte God, en toen ik z'n wiebel zoende stond die te trillen van aandoening.(...)

It felt like a first date. Vega had never been on a first date. She could not remember sleeping with someone she hadn't been in a fistfight with first.

Just remember, honey, you only have one heart.

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

My knives are like a tongue - I love, I do not love, I hate. If you don't love me, I am ready to attack. I am a double-edged knife.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are 'like' everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty...

We've managed to make a good marriage. This I say with all humility. It's a marriage in which there is nothing that can be hurt by the roughest usage. It's a marriage that you can let yourself go in, a marriage in which you can put your feet up and relax.

Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.

Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever." ? Louise Doughty, Whatever You Love

I wasn't vulnerable to you, to what I did with you, because I had fallen out of love with Guy. I was weary, and if I fell out of love with anything it was with that competence of mine. I fell out of love with myself.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience...

I feel there's a funny little hole in me that wasn't there before, like a splinter in your finger, but this is somewhere above my stomach.

put a wall around myself that kept me literally out of touch with my own feelings.