Quotes About Vulnerability

I felt defeated and dismayed. I trusted nobody, and I felt impotent-not only in the sexual sense.

I reached around and pulled my butt cheeks apart. That was all the reassurance he needed, and suddenly I felt that hot breath on my hole, felt the sandpaper of his face against my buttocks, and then—oh, brave new world!—felt his tongue lapping at me, licking me, caressing me where I had never been touched before.

What few people realized was that, beneath her tough exterior, Zoë was all about love. It was love that made her fight. Love that made her fierce.

Men who are cut off, careful, and closed are also lonely and just as vulnerable in a different way as their wives alone in a dark alley after midnight.

Every man needs a place to be open and vulnerable with brothers leaning together upon the Lord.

Fear is a self-protection we use to insulate ourselves from hurt by pulling back. Anger is self-protection we use to insulate ourselves from hurt by striking out.

In Ignatian spirituality there is nothing that you have to put in a box and hide. Nothing has to be feared. Nothing has to be hidden away. Everything can be opened up

Paradoxically, admitting your own powerlessness can free you from the need to fix everything and allow us to be truly present to the other person, and to listen. A cartoon in The New Yorker had one woman saying testily to her friend, 'There's no point in our being friends if you won't let me fix you.

I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts - protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The true me, my spiritual core, slipped further and further from reach.

Those who are brave, are the greatest cowards of all. For they fear failure.

Where the finite player plays for immortality, the infinite player plays as a mortal. In infinite play one chooses to be mortal inasmuch as one always plays dramatically, that is, toward the open, toward the horizon, toward surprise, where nothing can be scripted. It is a kind of play that requires complete vulnerability. To the degree that one is protected against the future, one has established a boundary and no longer plays with but against others.

When I am touched, I am touched only as the person I am behind all the theatrical masks, but at the same time I am changed from within-and whoever touches me is touched as well. We do not touch by design. Indeed, all designs are shattered by touching. Whoever touches and whoever is touched cannot but be surprised. (The unpredictability of this phenomenon is reflected in our reference to the insane as "touched.")

In their sexual play they suffer others, allow them to be as they are. Suffering others, they open themselves. Open, they learn both about others and about themselves. Learning, they grow. What they learn is not about sexuality, but how to be more concretely and originally themselves, to be the geniuses of their own actions, to be whole.

Can I come in? No! I'm in a towel! I'm blind!

Can I come in? No! I'm in a towel! I'm blind!

Red Cap gave my shoulder a squeeze . I felt like an orange. "If you're trying to get juice out of me," I said, "it's not going to work.

Some people confess in the flesh, others on paper.

She made no point of concealing the truth, for the truth was all she could bear now.

I looked like a million bucks. An unarmed million bucks, which isn't necessarily the best combination.

Those who help the poor the most hurt them the most.

As anyone who has ever read a used book knows, nothing exposes readers to quite such a high degree of nakedness as the underlinings and marginalia they live behind...

Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.

Never trust those who would be your shield. They feed on your ignorance and darkness. It is best to look at things directly and be unafraid.

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.