Quotes About Vulnerability

She went around reading men's minds. She went inside them as though they were bureaus and she were opening their drawers. She looked underneath folded articles of clothing. She found their dirty postcards. She pulled them out and had a look at them. And what lovely things she did find there.

I was always moved when mean people were suddenly nice to me. It was a weakness that would lead me into some bad relationships later in life.

We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection. Every night seemed like the last night because we would all freeze to death shortly.

There are things that are permissible in sex that aren't permissible elsewhere. You can smack each other and tie one another up and pee on them and strangle them. That's when love shows its face. When love takes off its clothes and has a drink. It sometimes takes the most appalling forms. It made the night seem like it was going to last forever.

She didn't know what it meant to always want to be close to someone. She wanted to have the same experiences as him. She wanted to hit him and have a bruise appear on her body.

He said that when you are in love with someone, you want to follow them to the bathroom. He said love just makes you pathetic.

That's the way I talked when I smoked pot. It was a gift. Every time I smoked up, these pretty phrases and ideas just popped into my head. Usually I went around with so many ugly insecure things flying around in my head that when a pretty thought came to me, it usually died a lonely death, afraid to come out. But when I was high, I simply had to utter it.

Jules always told me not to tell people your business, not to tell them your past. He said to keep them guessing. He said that once a person knew all there was to know about you, they'd take advantage of you. Trust nobody, he'd told me over and over. In a way, I'd kept his advice up until just then. I was stoned and felt like sharing all my shit with the whole world. I wanted to be taken advantage of.

He lay on his back, floating in the large bath, his penis like a lily pad.

Most of us hide away when we are sad, Rose thought. But performers were sad in public. She liked how honest they all were. They opened up their hearts They took out every emotion-no matter how small or pathetic or odd-and celebrated it.

First poems! They must be written on casual scraps of faded paper, interspersed here and there with withered flowers, or a lock of blond hair, or a discolored piece of ribbon, and the trace of a tear must still be visible in several places ... But first poems that are printed, in livid black and white, on dreadfully smooth paper are poems that have lost the finest points of their sweet, virginal charm, and now arouse a ghastly feeling of distaste in the author.

If you want to hurt somebody and you want to know where his vulnerable spot is you have to know him, before you can put in the right dig, that's very important.

One minute you're closer to someone than anyone in the whole world, next minute they need only to say the words 'time apart', 'serious talk' or 'maybe you...' and you're never going to see them again and will have to spend the next six months having imaginary conversations in which they beg to come back, and bursting into tears at the sight of their toothbrush.

Actually last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little angora crop top told me he was gay a sex addict a narcotic addict a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo.

Maybe there are just some men like that in the world, I thought. Men who have to be in charge, who have to punish those who awaken feelings in them which they cannot control. Men who will lure you with tenderness till you believe that you are safe then slap you down. Men whom it is impossible for anyone to love without losing their dignity. Men who have to damage those who love them most. But, then, I had fallen on love with one, so what did that make me?

On the night bus, I felt as though parts of other people were going into parts of me I didn't even know existed. I felt like I was being more intimate with members of the night-bus community than I'd ever been with anyone in my whole life.

The trouble with trying to go out with people when you get older is that everything becomes so loaded.

The world you're about to enter will be a different sea, with so much to do with how many likes you get on Facebook or who knows what ; where everyone is showing off rather than sharing their sadnesses and fears and what they really feel;

When a writer writes, it's as if she holds the sides of her chest apart, exposes her beating heart. And even though everything wants to heal, to close over and protect the heart, the writer must keep it bare, exposed.

Love is not a good thing, I've decided. It just makes you afraid you'll lose what you love, and then, because your fear makes a space for that to happen, it does. What's the point?

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.

If I were a writer and not a singer in 10 years, I don't know how I'd feel about writing really personal songs and getting someone else to sing them.

Writing is a very intimate thing, especially when you write lyrics and sing them in front of someone for the first time. It's like a really embarrassing situation. To me, singing is almost like crying, and you have to really know someone before you can start crying in front of them.

My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.