Quotes About Vulnerability

Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it... We want to be devoured by it, to hide ourselves in that fire which refines us.

he'd probably just crawl in the corner and starve. Like a hamster you forgot to feed.

It could have been a foxhole in the Somme being shelled by the Germans and all that mattered was her next to me in the dark, her arm beside mine.

By the time they were in their late twenties, all four young men knew that they were leaders. In public service, they had found a calling. They had chosen to stand before the people and ask for their support, to make themselves vulnerable.

Death had brushed hard against him

Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.

She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don't know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.

If someone cracks up, what does that mean? At what point does a person about to fall to pieces say: I'm cracking up? And if I were to crack up, what form would it take?

Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

But you know how it is—it's always that moment, when a man looks all wounded in his masculinity, one can't bear it, one needs to bolster him up." "Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?" "Yes, but I never seem to learn.

When a woman begins making love with a new man, a creature is born in her - of emotional and sexual responses that grows in its own laws, its own logic.

Then the man goes to the woman and says: I love you. And she says, in terror: What do you mean? He says: I love you. So she embraces him, and he moves away, with nervous haste, and she says: Why did you say you loved me? And he says: I wanted to hear how it would sound. And she says: But I love you, I love you, I love you – and he goes off to the very edge of the roof and stands there, ready to jump – he will jump if she says even once again: I love you

Martha's heart was beating wildly for several reasons. No one had ever tried to put his hand up her skirt before, and she was petrified at the wild driving. She looked confused and alarmed; and the old Scotsman decided to see her as the little girl he had known for years. He took a ten-shilling note from his stuffed wallet, and gave it to her. 'For when you go back to school,' he said bluffly.

I remembered the words particularly: Somebody pulled a thread of the fabric and it all dissolved.

I wish I hadn't become so conscious of everything. Once I wouldn't have noticed: now every conversation, every encounter with a person seems like crossing a mined field; and why can't I accept that one's closest friends at moments stick a knife in, deep, between the ribs?

Por qué siento esta necesidad tan horrible de forzar a los otros a que vean las cosas como yo? Es infantil; ¿por qué habrían de hacerlo? En el fondo, me da miedo encontrarme a solas con mis sentimientos.

Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don't realize it.

Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.

He never said Don't tell your mama. He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)

No one knew she cried in the night for Lyle and her lost happiness, that under that biscuit crust exterior she was all butter grief and hunger.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.

When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, I can't fix it, girl. I can't fix anything. If you don't as me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I'll try to give it to you.

The rage was a good feeling, stronger and purer than the shame that followed, the fear and the sudden urge to run and hide, to deny, to pretend I did not know who I was and what the world would do to me.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.