Quotes About Vulnerability

Kohut noticed that grandiosity, rather than improving your sex life, either makes you impotent or makes you so promiscuous that you cannot sustain relationships and you put yourself in danger of getting AIDS and dying. In other words, grandiosity tends to destroy you if you don't face up it and learn how to regulate it.

Of course not. A goat does not willingly enter the wolf's cave." "Goats are surefooted; they've got an accurate sense of smell." "And they are cautious, mein Herr. Because the wolf is faster, infinitely more aggressive. There would be only one chase. The goat's last.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

La Iglesia de la Razón, como todas las instituciones del Sistema, no se basa en la fuerza individual sino en la debilidad individual. Lo que en realidad se pide en la Iglesia de la Razón no es capacidad sino incapacidad. En ese caso es considerada "educable". Una persona verdaderamente capaz es siempre una amenaza

He doesn't answer. The lady pretends not to be listening, but her motionlessness reveals that she is. We walk toward the motorcycle, and I try to think of something, but nothing comes. I see he's crying a little and now looks away to prevent me from seeing it.

Genes are rarely about inevitability, especially when it comes to humans, the brain, or behavior. They're about vulnerability, propensities, tendencies

Interestingly, traumatic stress early in life (abuse, for example) greatly increases the risk of IBS in adulthood. This implies that childhood trauma can leave an echo of vulnerability, a large intestine that is hyperreactive to stress, long afterward.

All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.

I knew I couldn't sleep with her. I don't know - in my small experience of women, I've found it to hard to sleep with them at such times. Times when you get impression that there's more to them than an opportunity. Sleeping with girls was great, sleeping with people was a bit more complicated. Maybe it was a bad thing, maybe a sign of my immaturity, but I knew that there was some kind of tenderness in it as well.

we always spoke our minds we wouldn't have no friends at all, and no love, and the human race would die out.

The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.

this cat-and-mouse could not last forever, and he also knew that when you are the mouse you don't have much to say about it to the cat.

nothing ever happened to Jack Burden, who was invulnerable. Perhaps this was the curse of Jack Burden: he was invulnerable.

During one wave, I suddenly found myself cramped over in front of my tent, stark naked, painful, liquid acidic craps, and, the humiliation of it all, surrounded by six elephants, silent, quizzical, polite, murmuring, almost solicitous, their trunks waving in the air investigating my actions and moans. They watched my agonized shitting as if it were an engrossing, silent Shakespearean tragedy performed in the round.

Walt Whitman: "Hold me up, I want to shit.

No entanto, apesar de toda a minha força física, jamais me sentira tão fraco, porque era incapaz de secar as lágrimas dos olhos de minha irmã ou de livrar seu coração da tristeza.

He claims that the ring is all he has left and if it was stripped away, he'll crumble.

The reason they have to play it safe is because their financial positions are tenuous at best.

I blurted out, nearly in tears.

Arrogant or critical people are often people with low self-esteem who are afraid of taking risks.

I love you, she said. You made me fall in love with you. I don't care how tall you are or what color your hair is-I care about you. You make me laugh. You're smart. You're gentle. And you're real, you're a real person, not some jock with a facade that's going to fall apart when I get to know him. I know you already, and I love you, you idiot. I don't care what you do with toilet paper.

You're never safe from being surprised until you're dead.

Isn't it better to have your heart broken than to have it wither up? Before it could be broken it must have felt something splendid. That would be worth the pain.

Isn't it queer that the things we writhe over at night are seldom wicked things? Just humiliating ones.