Quotes About Vulnerability

Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?

Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important. Many people do not make it, though, and those people can begin to see the world as it is.

It seemed to him that he was seeing Italy without its clothing, naked and crude, stripped of niceties.

if we somehow find the courage to go directly into the discomfort - even the discomfort of illness, pain, old age, and death - we might discover something unexpected there.

Isn't mockery the province of the insecure?

I'm not great at talking to people. I have all these thoughts bunching up inside my head and then they come out like a dam bursting or something. I'm sorry.

I'm absolutely alone in this strange city, and I have a bad foot. I don't dare even move for fear of precipitating yet another crisis. I breathe softly, and think carefully. No sudden ideas, the shock could be fatal. It's a poor kind of protagonist really who just lies around on his bed.

When we pack too well, we are telling the world that it isn't good enough on its own, that it makes us uncomfortable and scared. We don't know if we can depend on anything or anyone, and we've decided it's better not to take the chance. —Stefany Anne Goldberg, "You Can Take It with You" (2012)

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies.

I became a psychotherapist because that's where people will unburden themselves, where they will show what is in their hearts.

But attempts to evade anxiety are not only doomed to failure. In running from anxiety you lose your most precious opportunities for the emergence of yourself, and for your education as s human being.

It is easier in our society to be naked physically than to be naked psychologically or spiritually—easier to share our body than to share our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal and the sharing of which is experienced as making us more vulnerable

A sick toss'd vessel, dashing on each thing . . . My God, I mean myself.

Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.

But they do not talk long before they make it clear that they expect the marriage partner, real or hoped-for, to fill some lack, some vacancy within themselves; and they are anxious and angry because he or she doesn't.

I am weak, I say with no presumptions. I have no merit, I note it, that is all. There are times that I feel so weak there most be a mistake, and as I don't know what I mean with this, I am not going to say anything else

They died... Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its trunk inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid?

I was angry at her, so angry — there is no greater weakness than to be in love with someone, to be at the mercy of it.

Duygularda korkunç bir ölümlülük var.

C'est là que je viens me cacher quand j'ai peur. - Peur de quoi, Madame Rosa ? - C'est pas nécessaire d'avoir des raisons pour avoir peur, Momo. Ça, j'ai jamais oublié, parce que c'est la chose la plus vraie que j'aie jamais entendue.

She was pressing her body against his while leaning back from the waist up in that attitude of children and whores.

No one knew the desert better than Scholscher, who had spent so many nights alone there on the starlit dunes, and no one understood better than he did that need for protection which sometimes grips men's hearts and drives them to give a dog the affection they dream so desperately of receiving themselves. And certainly this deep feeling of helplessness had never been more agonizing than now.

Tout ce que je veux dire, c'est que si les hommes cédaient toujours à ce qu'il y a en eux de plus humain, il y a longtemps qu'ils ne seraient plus des hommes.