I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the speaker's awareness of their emotional susceptibility in intense relationships and their desire to protect themselves from it.
In this quote, Salman Rushdie expresses a deep understanding of the impact that passionate and unstable relationships can have on an individual. He acknowledges his vulnerability to such connections, indicating a struggle to balance emotional engagement with self-protection. The quote highlights the tension between longing for intimacy and the fear of being hurt, showcasing the complexity of human relationships where passion can sometimes lead to emotional turmoil.
In practice
During a therapy session discussing emotional challenges in relationships.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Good advice is rarer than rubies.
You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to makes such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person I thought it was your secret pride." "I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor." She didn't answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.
As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.
This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together– black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu– a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.
And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.
We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.
What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us wind up in parentheses.
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