Quotes About Vulnerability

As she only cries about once a year I really ought to have gone over and comforted her, but I wanted to set it all down here. I begin to see that writers are liable to become callous.

I didn't make any mistake. I know that when he nearly asked me to marry him it was only on impulse It is part if a follow-my-leader game of second-best we have all been playing - Rose with Simon, Simon with me, me with Stephen and Stephen, I suppose, with that detestable Leda Fox-Cotton. It isn't a very good game; the people you play it with are apt to get hurt.

It's hopeless to make friends with people who never talk about themselves.

I don't want your candor. I want your soul in a silver thimble.

Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words.

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Sex finds us. Sex sees through us. That's why it's so shattering. It strips us of appearances.

The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.

Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be only human, subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.

I couldn't help suspecting I had manufactured the whole thing, my need for him, simply to avoid what I considered to be the alternatives. This is one of my very annoying traits. I can't sit back and let something grow of its own momentum and eventually reveal its truth or horror. I must probe it from the outset.

People get bitten. But I won't.' I found myself saying, 'You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite you and you will die.

El sexo nos descubre. El sexo nos revela como somos. Por eso es tan estremecedor. Nos despoja de toda apariencia.

She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets.

Te lo ricordi com'era, sudare sotto le coperte, da bambini? La febbre è una cosa segreta. È come cadere in un buco dove nessuno può seguirti, ma non provi né paura né dolore perché non ti senti neanche te stesso. Io adoro raggomitolarmi nel sudore.

it can't afford to be hard. it won't allow itself psychologically.

Then she took of her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed. I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being.

Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom. ... Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you. I understand completely.

I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense. •

Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.

If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it's the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People

Once I almost asked her to put on legwarmers before we made love. But it seemed a request more deeply rooted in pathos than in aberrant sexuality and I thought it might make her suspect that something was wrong.

I'll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant