Quotes About Vulnerability

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

Eles não podem alterar os sentimentos... aliás, nem nós próprios poderíamos alterá-los, mesmo que quiséssemos. Podiam pôr a nu, com todo o pormenor, quanto houvéramos feito, dito ou pensado; mas o mais fundo do coração, cujo funcionamento até para nós constitui um mistério, há-de ser sempre inexpugnável.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection … that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

His bowels seemed to turn to water.

It was queer to think that less than three minutes earlier I'd been in the devil of a stew, with actual cold sweat on my backbone, at the thought that she might be dead.

Non esiste nulla di peggio del dolore fisico. Davanti al dolore, continuò a pensare Winston mentre si contorceva sul pavimento, stringendo inutilmente il braccio sinistro ormai invalido, non ci sono eroi. No, davanti al dolore non ci sono eroi.

They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

El hombre es el único ser que consume sin producir. No da leche, no pone huevos, es demasiado débil para tirar del arado y no es capaz de correr suficientemente rápido como para atrapar conejos.

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

As once, when the armies of the empire were shattered and the strong barbarians poured in upon the soft provincials, so now the fierce weeds pressed in to destroy the pampered nursling's of man.

as a protection against my own weaknesses

Weak people live in perpetual fear and foreboding.

Nunca me ha ocurrido; no sé llorar. En cuanto las lágrimas acuden a mis ojos, los sollozos anudan mi garganta, me ahogo, mi respiración se mezcla con gritos y gemidos; y, como aborrezco dar espectáculos de dolor, he pensado en quedarme muerta; y así he de morir probablemente algún día, si alguna desgracia me sorprende estando sola.

When a child is lost there is no end to the self-torment a parent may inflict. When we love, and the object of our love is small, weak, and vulnerable, and has looked to us and us alone for protection; and when such protection, for whatever reason, has failed, what consolation (what justification, what defense) may there possibly be?

Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

Some blows fall too heavy upon those too fragile.

That's it for me. I'm fucked. As per usual. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Although come to think of it I was never even the freaking bridesmaid. Look, show your cock. It's the shortest line between two points. The world ain't giving away nice lives. You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock. It's what you got.

I have plenty of friends, she says. Name one. She looks at me. Which I guess is sort of sweet.

He didn't like the thought of them knowing he'd been scared. Didn't like the thought of them knowing what a fool he'd been. Oh, to hell with that! Tell everyone! He'd done it! He'd been driven to do it and he'd done it and that was it. That was him. That was part of who he was.

They were both so scared they weren't talking at all, which made me feel the kind of shame you know you're not going to cure by saying sorry, and where the only thing to do is: go out, get more shame.

Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.

Look, show your cock. It's the shortest line between two points. The world ain't giving away nice lives. You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock. It's what you got.

We were all over each other in the super-friendly way of puppies, or spouses meeting for the first time after one of them has undergone a close brush with death.

Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings -- Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.