Quotes About Vulnerability

It was as if - this something I thought of only later, of course - she was gently peeling back one layer after another that covered a person's heart, a very sensual feeling.

I'm not trying to imply I can keep up this silent, isolated facade all the time. Sometimes the wall I've erected around me comes crumbling down. It doesn't happen very often, but sometimes, before I even realize what's going on, there I am--naked and defenseless and totally confused. At times like that I always feel an omen calling out to me, like a dark, omnipresent pool of water. ~page 10

A state of chronic powerlessness eats away at a person

Two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes.

Loving her, and being loved, was the only way I could hold myself together.

Well, finally, once you become an orphan, you're an orphan till the day you die. I keep having the same dream. I'm seven years old and an orphan again. All alone, with no adults around to take care of me. It's evening, and the light is fading, and night is pressing in. It's always the same. In the dream I always go back to being seven years old. Software like that you can't exchange once it's contaminated.

Still, being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It's when you can't even feel any pain anymore that you're in real trouble.

It's kind of embarrassing to put this into words, she said, but I want to stay friends with you, Junpei. Not just for now, but even after we get older. A lot older. I love Takatsuki, but I need you, too, in a different way. Does that make me selfish?

As soon as I sat down across from her, she ordered me to put the entire contents of my pants pockets on the table. I did as I was told, saying nothing. My reality seemed to have left me and was now wandering around nearby. I hope it can find me, I thought.

Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by minimizing her wounds—staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as possible.

The kind of helpless feeling when everything you're used to has been ripped away. Like there's no more gravity, and I'm left to drift in outer space with no idea where I'm going.

Then, all but instinctively, I took her in my arms. Pressed against me, her whole body trembling, she continued to cry without a sound.

I'm completely empty. Do you know what it means to be completely empty? Being empty is like an unlived-in house. An unlocked unlived-in house. Anybody can come in, any time they want. That's what scares me the most.

To tell you the truth, though, I loved his weak side, too. I loved it as much as I loved his good side. There was absolutely nothing mean or sneaky about him. He was weak: that's all.

People are weak when they are alone.

I forced words out: There are some things about myself I can't explain to anyone. There are some things I don't understand at all. I can't tell what I think about things or what I'm supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail, the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared , I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I'm not such a wonderful human being.

I don't know , sometimes I think I've got this hard kernel in my heart, and nothing much can get inside it. I doubt if I can really love anybody.

I do feel that I've managed to make something I could maybe call my own world ... over time ... little by little. And when I'm inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that, I am a weak person, that I bruise easily, don't you think? And in the eyes of society at large, that world of mine is a puny little thing.

At nineteen, I knew nothing about the inner workings of my own heart, let alone the hearts of others. Still, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of how happiness and sadness worked. What I couldn't yet grasp were all the myriad phenomenon that lay in the space between happiness and sadness, how they related to each other. As a result, I often felt anxious and helpless.

I still have that fear, even now—that suddenly my very existence will be denied and, through no fault of my own, I'll be hurled into the night sea once more. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to form deep relationships with people. I always keep a distance between me and others." He

It's hard to breathe, and I close my eyes. There's a hard lump of air in my chest, like I've swallowed a raincloud whole.

We had been playing our assigned roles on the office stage, but stepping down from the stage, abandoning the images that we had been projecting there, we were both just unstable, awkward lumps of flesh, warm pieces of meat kitted out with digestive tracts and hearts and brains and reproductive organs.

It wasn't what I'd characterize as a happy part of my life, living as I was, a balled-up mass of unfulfilled desires. I was much younger, much hungrier, much more alone. But I was myself, pared down to the essentials.

A more pressing problem for me is that I have never been able to love anyone seriously. I have never felt unconditional love for anyone since the day I was born, never felt that I could give myself completely to that one person. Never once.