Quotes About Vulnerability

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them--always thinking people are so important--especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it--on the inside.

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped form him - as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

She wouldn't let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up in a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity—we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary's cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret wamrth within.

Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in her arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching in the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions. As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.

Évszázadok telnek még el, mire egy amazon végre képes lesz fölfogni azt a tényt, hogy a férfi kizárólag a büszkeségében sebezhetÅ' meg, de ha ezt egyszer megrobbantják, törékeny lesz az egész ember, akár a tojás.

Man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with - though some of them paid the fact a cautious lipservice.

She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words.

Yet her tired heart, beating until it shook her breasts, made her sure that there was still life in her, desperately shaken, threatened…

naked souls are poor things ever

The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third--before long the best lines cancel out--and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture.

For the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

I'm always afraid of a girl—until I've kissed her. SHE:

And in the end, we were all just humans...drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal our brokenness.

Elle était incurablement malhonnête. Elle ne supportait pas d'être mise en échec et, pour compenser cette fragilité, je pense qu'elle s'était exercée à mentir dès son plus jeune âge, afin de présenter au monde un sourire d'insolence glaciale tout en cédant aux exigences de son tempérament avide et cynique.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sought each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast…

Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her life.

He merely slid into the matter through his inability to make definite judgments. He could say No! neither to man nor woman; borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening.

never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part—once in bed, you're safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you're safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.

For a full minute, our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth--like some nightmare attempt to attach our naval cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation. -Cecelia Brady describing the earthquake