“It is a violation of trust to use your kids as caulking for the cracks in you.”
Vulnerable feeling
Vulnerable Quotes — page 56 of 73
“Part of me loves and respects men so desperately, and part of me thinks they are so embarrassingly incompetent at life and in love. You have to teach them the very basics of emotional literacy. You have to teach them how to be there for you, and part of me feels tender toward them and gentle, and part of me is so afraid of them, afraid of any more violation.”
“Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.”
“Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.”
“I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.”
“Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive.”
“Mothers are supposed to listen and, afterward, to respond with some wisdom and perspective, but these things were not my mother's strong suit.”
“I have been somebody who has not written a great deal about the truth of my family's life.”
“I wasn't that great a chef, and I don't think I'm that great a writer.”
“I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing.”
“I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?”
“No destiny attacks us from outside. But, within him, man bears his fate and there comes a moment when he knows himself vulnerable; and then, as in a vertigo, blunder upon blunder lures him.”
“I can't imagine anybody in my life I've been more vulnerable with than my wife.”
“I never utter my real feelings about anything. My lighter, superficial side will always be too quick for the deeper side of me, and that's why it always wins.”
“He clings to his solitude, to his affected indifference and his grown-up ways, but it's just an act, so as never, never to show his real feelings.”
“Sometimes I'm so deeply buried under self-reproaches that I long for a word of comfort to help me dig myself out again.”
“I can't let them see my doubts, or the wounds they've inflicted on me.”
“Then I fall asleep with a stupid feeling of wishing to be different from what I am or from what I want to be; perhaps to behave differently from the way I want to behave or do behave.”
“I do my best to please everybody, far more than they'd ever guess. I try to laugh it all off, because I don't want to let them see my trouble.”
“I wish I could find people who just would fight me and break through to me and hold me down and scream their life into my face.”