Quotes About Vulnerability

Relationships require complete integrity. The first time you lie or are untrue to your partner, you condemn yourself and your partner to a second-class relationship. First-class relationships are possible only in an atmosphere of total trust.

Only an object can suffer, but phenomenally subject and object, being one whole, spin like a coin so that the intervals between pile et face (heads and tails) are imperceptible. Consequently pain, or pleasure, appear to be continual. Noumenally, on the contrary, there is no object to suffer pain or pleasure. Noumenon is invulnerable, and cannot be otherwise. Noumenon is the unmanifested aspect of what we, sentient beings, are: Phenomenon is our manifestation.

Courage is being afraid and going ahead and trying anyway. One can still be afraid and still be courageous.

I was the kid who always thought I was chickenshit, and I had been terrified for most of my life. In treatment, people were suddenly loving me for me. Unconditionally. I had told them the goriest, most horrible stuff about myself … and they hugged me for it. This was what I had been looking for forever— a place to fit in.

The problem is that we're afraid, and that's the reason we fight each other. We keep making it about other countries or religions, and it's not. Why can't we sit down and talk about what we're afraid of? We're afraid to tell the truth.

In that humiliating, spirit-crushing, bone-aching, ah-ha! moment, a lightbulb went off in my head. I thought to myself, I finally get it. Anytime I'm in a relationship with any living thing and I have the need to win, the possibility for connection and closeness is over.

If you walk through your fear that something must be wrong with you, then what you always find on the other side is that there's nothing wrong with you. And there's nothing to be afraid of," he tells her. "What happens then?" Katie asks, sobbing. "When you get to that other side, there's only one thing waiting—joy.

And that's the soulful thing about playing: you offer something to somebody. You don't know if they'll like it, but you offer it.

Anytime you have to rely upon your enemy for a job you're in bad shape.

Nada querría más que estirar este rato delicioso como un cuento sin principio ni fin, hasta que el mundo fuera otra vez simple y no hubiera tantos cañones apuntándome...

Truly, men often fail to understand their own weaknesses," I said neutrally, "and their lack of self-knowledge can bring terrible disasters down on their own heads.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

I don't feel naked around you anymore.

I felt he didn't need much warmth from anybody. His own 37.5º C were sufficient for him. His spirit slept alone. I thought about how, after Ben and I made love he'd turn his body away from me. His naked back would face me. Even though our bodies were just two or three centimeters apart, I couldn't bear that distance. I felt abandoned and sometimes, in the dark, I couldn't help myself, I missed Xiaolin. I missed nights with Xiaolin.

No one likes crying, but tears water our souls.

No one like crying, but tears water our souls. So, perhaps my thanks should be to allow you to cry for the Chinese women in my books...

Why were children the only ones who ever got to melt down?

But in a world turned upside down, things I thought were mine and mine alone can be taken away much more easily than I would have imagined. If my body were cut up in pieces and those pieces mixed with those of other bodies, and then if someone told me, "Find your left eye," I suppose it would be difficult to do so.

When I'm curled up in his arms like this, I can never tell how my body looks to him. I worry that I seem completely ridiculous, but I have the ability to squeeze into any little space he leaves for me. I fold my legs until they take up almost no room at all, and curl in my shoulders until they're practically dislocated. Like a mummy in a tomb. And when I get like this, I don't care if I never get out; or maybe that's exactly what I hope will happen.

It was as if a tiny crack had opened somewhere in him and was growing, tearing him to pieces. If he had simply been angry, I might have found a way to calm him, but I had no idea how to put him back together once he came apart.

I was afraid that if she went on much longer, her fingers would scrape away my skin, rip my flesh, crush my bones. The pillow was damp with saliva, and I wanted to scream.

The reason she was crying didn't matter to me. Perhaps there was no reason at all. Her tears had that sort of purity.

Your body falling through space touches the deepest part of me.

The blades touched my abdomen. A cold shock ran through me, and my head began to spin. If he had pressed just a bit harder, the scissors might have pierced my soft belly. The skin would have peeled back, the fat beneath laid bare. Blood would have dripped on the bedspread.