Quotes About Vulnerability

could have been chloral," Steve said. "Chloral hydrate. The stuff they use when they want to give somebody a mickey.

It's healthy to say uncle when your bone's about to break.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

Can you imagine going to bed with Kierkegaard? He'd never stop asking, 'Can I do this to you? Is this okay?

Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days - spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive - I was probably most afraid of my parents.

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.

You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets. Colleen

I'm the fat little humiliation he's married to.

I tell you everything." "Nothing that matters.

He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he'd been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are straight man's burden.

To love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

Why I'm dolling myself up like this…" "You're putting on armor. You want to be strong.

But what you are saying now, the way you're speaking to me - there's a level to this that I never saw when you were in the group. A level of honesty, vulnerability. If you could have opened yourself up like this even once… It's kind of amazing to see it now.

People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you are afraid.

She seemed more pitiable than murderable.

But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden.

She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail

A fact of my life was that I had a morbid fear of reproach, especially from women.

She wore an expression of love so naked it seemed to Pip almost obscene.

I have often wondered what the prey is feeling when it is captured. Often it seems to become completely still in the predator's jaws, as if it feels no pain. As if nature, at the very end, shows mercy for it.

The wind had teeth today, it bit right through his calfskin jacket. It was a wind unchecked by any serious topography between the Arctic and St. Jude.

The problem is we trust technology. We put our trust in the safing of the warheads, and we neglect the human side, because tech problems are easy and human problems are hard.

simply by trying to speak honestly, surrendering to emotion, supporting other people in their honesty and emotion, she experienced her first glimmerings of spirituality.

She was certainly hungry to sleep with someone; it was practically forever since she'd done it. But she liked Jason a little too much to think it was a good idea to sleep with him. What if she started liking him even more? Relationship pain and relationship horror seemed probable.