Paulo Coelho Quotes

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

The world's my oyster. But it worries me, all this showing off about being happy. Life is so precarious, and I know terrible things can happen. At the moment, everything is happy.

There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.

The messiness [in my books] is nothing like an Atwood novel. For me, the deeper subjects are secrets versus intimacy, and how both beget safety but also threaten it. And there is a lot for me about loss, too.

Every relationship is just so tenuous and precarious.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

I felt vulnerable and very much between friends. I remember walking down the hallway and thinking I had no way of knowing what was coming, literally. This wasn't because I had some horrific bullying story, but because of a steady drip of negativity.

I don't have control over what's on screen, and that's terrifying.

Romantic love can be terrifying. We experience another human being as enormously important to us. So there is surrender - not a surrender to the other person so much as to our feeling for the other person. What is the obstacle? The possibility of loss.

There's something really vulnerable about playing something that you like for someone. You don't know what their reaction will be.

The more freedom I allow myself as a writer to wander, become lost and go into uncertain territory - and I am always trying to go to the more awkward place, the more difficult place - the more frightening it is, because I have no plan.

I'm always surprised to rediscover that there's something kind of scary about life; and that the feeling we have that we're in charge is probably ill founded.

It's inevitable that you feel scared when you don't have control of a situation.

You want there to be some magical answer that will just make everything clear and easy to understand, and that's just not the way love works.

Life is a very scary thing because it's unknown. Anything can happen anytime, and that is terrifying for all of us: to not to be in control.

Anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That's when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

That only shows you have no heart,’ she said. But her eyes said that she knew he had a heart, and that was why she was afraid of him

What do you fear, most of all? The possibility that love may not be enough.

But it's always taking a risk, when you ... kiss someone new.

Was love then like a bag of assorted sweets passed around from which one might choose more than once? Some might sting the tongue, some invoke night perfume. Some had centers as bitter as gall, some blended honey and poison, some were quickly swallowed. And among the common bull's-eyes and peppermints a few rare ones; one or two with deadly needles at the heart, another that brought clam and gentle pleasure. Were his fingers closing on that one?

Really it's always things that scare me like loss of control, dealing with the unknown and the unseen... Something that's not supposed to be there and you don't know where it came from, or what it wants from you, or how to defend yourself against it. That's the root of the things I find scary.

It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to be complicated. And love is always complicated. But humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

Why is everybody afraid of love?

Everybody's afraid of love, because love is what hurts the most.

…there was no more safety to be found in love than there was to be found in a virus.