Quotes About Vulnerability

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. p. xxi

Dammit, I gotta go," Clint rasped. He slid off the bed, and faltered. His gown bunched at the waist and Greer looked away, but not before glimpsing something she knew she could never unsee.

This is my body, and I am terrified of the space it takes up.

You could not love a man who was always playing hide-and-seek with you; that was the lesson she had learned.

It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.

When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.

what I wanted was to be willing to be afraid

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors to my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.

As for lovers, they are discovering New ways to love. Listen, their windows are open. You can hear them laughing.

I don't want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years. That way, you forget too many important things.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead. Every morning, so far, I'm alive.

Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one's own nitty-gritty.

The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood.

People that trust themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their throats cut.

Men love a prop so well, that they will lean on a pointed poisoned spear; and such was he, the impostor, who, with fear of hell for his scourge, most ravenous wolf, played the driver to a credulous flock.

we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves--such a friend ought to be--do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.

Alangkah anehnya perasaan kita! Kita merasa begitu mencintai hidup pada saat-saat kita terancam bahaya maut!

Yap?s? böyle tuhaft?r ruhlar?m?z?n: BaÅŸar? yahut y?k?la aram?zdaki baÄŸ bu kadar zay?ft?r.

I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.

Literature and fiction are full of femmes fatales, but there is also an homme fatal, an altogether rarer bird, and pity help the lonely and impressionable female who comes within range of him.

You made a discovery yesterday; remember? 'No man is an Island.' It's true in more ways than one. Don't go on hating yourself because there are some things you can't do and can't face on your own. None of us can.

I am unstable, sometimes melancholy, and have been called on some occasions imperious; but I never did an ungenerous act in my life. I sympathise warmly with others, and have wasted my heart in their love.