Quotes About Vulnerability

Don't always try to be cool. The whole universe is cool. It's the warm bits that matter.

We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they - the terror, the love - were one in the same thing.

I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

Rumi wrote in the twelfth century, 'The wound is the place where the light enters you.' (He also wrote: 'Forget safety. Live where you fear to live.')

Don't be a perfectionist. Humans are imperfect. Human work is imperfect. Be less robot, more human. Be more imperfect. Evolution happens through mistakes.

Check your emotional armour is actually protecting you, and not so heavy you can't move.

But, as C.S. Lewis once put it, 'The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say "My tooth is aching" than to say "My heart is broken".

I had never been one of those males who were scared of tears. I'd been a Cure fan, for God's sake.

A million people a year kill themselves. Between ten and twenty million people a year try to. Worldwide, men are over three times more likely to kill themselves than women.

I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.

Why do so many men still kill themselves? What is going wrong? The common answer is that men, traditionally, see mental illness as a sign of weakness and are reluctant to seek help. Boys don't cry.

Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.

This is what happens when you live on Earth. You crack. You hold reality in your hands until it burns and then you have to drop the plate.

I began to wonder if it was a bad thing to dwell on problems. But then I remembered that it is precisely not talking about problems that is itself a problem. It's what causes people to break down in their office or classroom. It's what fills up addiction units and hospitals and raises suicide figures.

the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.

Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand.

It's okay to wear the scars of experience.

It's okay to let people find you. You don't have to spread yourself so thin you become invisible. You don't have to always be the person reaching out. You can sometimes allow yourself to be reached. As the great writer Anne Lamott puts it: "Lighthouses don't go running all over an island for boats to save; they just stand there shining.

But what I didn't realise was that when it came to that sneaking, camouflaged, untouchable giant known as the Future, I was as vulnerable as anyone.

when you know it is possible for you to feel pain you have no control over. You become vulnerable. Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.

You can see that for her, being a parent is standing on a shore and watching her child in a vulnerable craft, heading out over deeper and deeper water, hoping but not knowing there will be land somewhere ahead.

I love her so much. I could not love her more. And the terror of not allowing myself to lover her has beaten that fear of losing her.

If, as Schopenhauer said, "we forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people," then love—at its best—is a way to reclaim those lost parts of ourselves. That freedom we lost somewhere quite early in childhood. Maybe love is just about finding the person you can be your weird self with.