Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan; you should wear it inside, where it functions best.

I'm actually very vulnerable and sensitive.

Do not tell everyone your story. You will only end up feeling more rejected. People cannot give you what you long for in your heart. The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.

It seems as though I've always been,somebody outside looking in,well, here I am for all of them to bleed,but they can't take my heart from me,and they can't bring me to my knees,they'll never know the real me.

You can't truly have an open heart until it's been broken.

being physically intimidating didn't keep you from getting your feelings hurt. Everyone's heart is the same size.

For me, the hero’s journey is not the voyage from weakness to strength. The true hero’s journey is the voyage from strength to weakness.

You might think I'm bulletproof, but I'm not.

This is how your heart gets snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away.

Be brave enough to break your own heart.

To get the stuff out of you, especially if what you're dealing with is yourself, requires you to open up and touch tender spots. You have to be anesthetized a little bit.

I'm afraid if I listen to my heart once, I'll never figure out how to ignore it again.

But in my heart I knew that just like the new grass, I wasn't strong enough yet to be walked on

Your heart opens and of course you're completely panicked because you're used to guarding this organ with your life.

The chances we take, knowing no better than to fall or to stand back and hold ourselves in... protecting our hearts with the tightest of grips.

Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.

Trying to understand the fear I had of truly opening my heart - first, you have to be whole to do that. The fears, the voices in my mind saying, "Oh, you don't want to do that, you might get hurt, they might abandon you - "those are ghost voices from my mom and dad.

The story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it.

Iain didn't go back to sleep for a long while. He continued to think about all the logical reasons he would never allow himself to be turned into a lovesick weakling like Patrick, and when he finally fell asleep, he had convinced himself that he would distance his heart from his mind. He dreamed about her.

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

If you're a bit spongy, vulnerable to the unsettling energy of others, count yourself lucky. You've been given an incentive to armor up, to consciously screen out the ubiquitous stresses that afflict humanity.

They call you heartless; but you have a heart and I love you for being ashamed to show it.

By being vulnerable, either with yourself or in the presence of another person, that’s where all growth and ultimate well-being comes from.