Fragile Masculinity Quotes

if
the very
idea
of
standing up
for myself
frightens you
so
damn much
then
i guess
the power
you thought
you held
over ome
wasn't that
impressive
in the
first place.

-fragile masculinity ~ Amanda Lovelace

[Speaking to a group of female students] Have you any notion how many books are written [by men] about women in the course of one year? (...) Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? (...)
Professors, schoolmasters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women (...) were very angry (...) as they wrote (...) about the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of women. (...) Why were they angry? (...)
Possibly when the professor [imagined by V. Woolf as a prototype of patriarchal writer] insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. (...) Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch (...) of feeling that great number of people, half the human race indeed [=women], are by nature inferior to himself.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. (…) That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished (…)

A Room of One´s Own, chapter 2 ~ Virginia Woolf

And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies. ~ Leonard Cohen

Nothing was easier to shatter than the fragile shield of an idealist. ~ Kristin Hannah

It seems Korean women are enjoying a passive and fragile status, intoxicated by appearance. Not only feminism, but any serious discourse ends up being swept away by popular culture in Korea. ~ Kim Hyesoon

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

It's not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are – beneath the bluster – intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, and pitiful and in search of consolation and forgiveness.
We're well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we're slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealised potential. We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers.
It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another. ~ Alain De Botton

Chet Faker's a reference to the late Chet Baker. I'm a big fan of his vocal style; it's quite fragile and soft, and that was a style I wanted to take on. ~ Chet Faker

A loosening in my chest, the faintest stirrings of hope. But hope was a dangerous, fragile thing, easily shattered. I couldn't afford it. ~ Erica O'Rourke

When my parents were away, I would often be sent to spend the night in the house of an older lady who I didn't know, and who didn't seem to know me, either. (I assume it was a friendly neighbor or acquaintance, or at least hope it was.)
I hated it.
I remember the smell of the old leather photo frame containing a picture of my mum and dad that I would cling to in the strange bed. I was too young to understand that my parents would be coming back soon.
But it taught me another big lesson: Don't leave your children if they don't want you to.
Life, and their childhood, is so short and fragile. ~ Bear Grylls

I'm impressed by your protectiveness over them, but I'm only asking for an introduction. Are they so fragile they need an old man as chaperon? Do they have no tongues? ~ Stephen Lloyd Jones

She thought of the way Jace had looked at her then, the blaze of faith in his eyes, his belief in her. He had always thought she was strong. He had showed it in everything he did, in every look and every touch. Simon had faith in her too, yet when he'd held her, it had been as if she were something fragile, something made of delicate glass. But Jace had held her with all the strength he had, never wondering if she could take it
he'd known she was as strong as he was. ~ Cassandra Clare

I'm not fragile, I teased and kissed him harder. I supposed my bruise would say otherwise, but I didn't want to be treated like I was going to shatter if someone touched me. ~ Christie Cote

With Nicky's form of EB, once an area gets over-wounded it never gets strong again. Some areas do not even heal ever again. These areas now included his feet. Even when they did heal, they were so incredibly fragile that even a simple step or a little pressure to get himself off the computer chair to the bed would cause a blister the size of my fist. ~ Silvia Corradin

Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Her heart was a little bruised up His had not yet learned to forget When they hugged, there were fragile parts." -MJ ABRAHAM ~ Claire Contreras

The gift of love is in the simplest and utter joy of just being with the other. In coming alive to the present moment, together. In recognizing and being overwhelmingly grateful that among countless other possibilities that the vastness of life throws, the moment was possible. The impatience of love, is to desire a million such moments stretching forever. Small. Beautiful. Profound. Fragile. Floating away like flowers on the flowing brook. How foolish we are sometimes to miss the gift of the present, in our desire to imprison the future? ~ Srividya Srinivasan

Dead Butterfly
By Ellen Bass
For months my daughter carried
a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.
To and from school in her backpack,
to her only friend's house. At the dinner table
it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.
She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.
Was it the year her brother was born?
Was this her own too-fragile baby
that had lived - so briefly - in its glassed world?
Or the year she refused to go to her father's house?
Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?
This plump child in her rolled-down socks
I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me
and carry safe again. What was her fierce
commitment? I never understood.
We just lived with the dead winged thing
as part of her, as part of us,
weightless in its heavy jar. ~ Ellen Bass

If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

This is not the last time he will get himself in trouble with bravado that cannot be backed up. He ends up dying that way. ~ Tanya Tagaq

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile. ~ Ayrton Senna

Adam arrived at 735 Monroe Street prepared for the woman to be a bit skittish.
After all, she'd run from him earlier, obviously intimidated by his overwhelming masculinity and epic sexuality. Women often had that reaction to him, especially when he was stripping off his pants. Or kilt, depending on the century.
He was also prepared, however, for her inhibitions to drop swiftly, as did all women's when they got a good, close-up look at him.
After that, many simply launched themselves at him in a full-frontal assault of sexual frenzy. He'd been entertaining himself with just that possibility, his entire body tight with lust, while tracking her down with the information he'd obtained int he room called "Human Resources" at Little & Staller.
But nothing in his vast repertoire of experience had prepared him for Gabrielle O'Callaghan.
The bloodthirsty little hellion didn't react like any woman he'd ever encountered. She took one horrified look at him, drew back her arm, hauled off, and smashed him in the face with some kind of satchel she was holding.
Then slammed the door and locked it.
Leaving him on the doorstep, bleeding. Bleeding, by Danu, blood trickling from his lip! ~ Karen Marie Moning

What is masculine and what is feminine, anyway? Why should men not show that they can be fragile or seductive? I am only happy when there is no discrimination. ~ Jean Paul Gaultier

In a male-centered gender hierarchy, where it is assumed that men are better than women and that masculinity is superior to femininity, there is no greater perceived threat than the existence of trans women, who despite being born male and inheriting male privilege 'choose' to be female instead. ~ Julia Serano

Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world? ~ Haruki Murakami

(He was) a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic. ~ Bob Costas

It was one thing to have your own kind of hope, an ember you could nurture inside, something to inspire you when things got dark. If it died, it was on you; no one else even had to know about it, and you were free to reignite it, or to give up and walk away. But when you were carrying it with another person, for another person, it was a dangerous dream. Treacherous as the sea, yet fragile as a bubble. ~ Sarah Ockler

Hope was a hummingbird. Tiny in size and fragile by nature. Beautiful. ~ T.S. Joyce

If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a family is more like a rope. We're lots of fragile little strands, and we survive by becoming hopelessly intertwined with each other. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

The problem with the 'masculinity crisis' is not that women have excelled too much and therefore created a crisis for men, but that we have such a stein inability to let go of what it has traditionally meant to be a man ... As long as we perpetuate the myth that men have inherent qualities that make them more suitable than women for certain types of work, the shifting nature of the economy (and women's attainment of better jobs) is going to continue to be interpreted as a crisis of masculinity. ~ Samhita Mukhopadhyay

His power, his intense masculinity, hit me like a semi, sucking the air out of my lungs. He doesn't help matters when he steps closer, forcing me to look up at him. My five seven is no match against his six three. ~ Magda Alexander

I feel fragile, like if somebody looked at me the wrong way I might shatter into a million pieces and never be whole again. ~ Laurie Elizabeth Flynn

Like fragile ice, anger passes away in time. Therefore, the greatest remedy for anger is delay. - Gideon Penman of Muirwood Abbey ~ Jeff Wheeler

Gordy," I said. "I need to talk to you."
"I don't have time," he said. "Mr. Orcutt and I have to debug some PCs. Don't you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague."
Wow, and people thought I was a freak.
"I much prefer Macs, don't you?" he asked. "They're so poetic. ~ Sherman Alexie

They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends - daring and knowledgable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored while Mo cut leather and fabric to the right size and re-stitched old pages that over countless years had grown fragile from the many fingers leafing through them. ~ Cornelia Funke

A hole opened up and he had to know what was inside it. So he picked and picked until the hole was huge, and then everything sort of ... fell in, him, his wife, his kid, and this fragile life they'd built at the edge of this hole. And that's why he was here, because he'd begun wondering if maybe his father hadn't fallen in the same hole - ~ Jess Walter

Glad it was you and not me," Shane said, and offered Myrin a hand up. "Any brain damage?"
"Since the bullet actually passed through his brain, then yes, idiot boy, there's certainly brain damage," Oliver said. "It will pass. His brain's the least fragile thing about him."
"You say the nicest things," Myrin said. He was slurring his words, and he threw an arm around Oliver's neck. "Marry me. ~ Rachel Caine

Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds' eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks. Or they are words on the air, composed of sounds and ideas-abstract, invisible, gone once they've been spoken-and what could be more frail than that? But some stories, small, simple ones about setting out on adventures or people doing wonders, tales of miracles and monsters, have outlasted all the people who told them, and some of them have outlasted the lands in which they were created. ~ Neil Gaiman

Perhaps the deepest reason we are afraid of death is that we do not know who we are. We believe in a personal, unique, and separate identity; but if we dare to examine it, we find that this identity depends entirely on an endless collection of things to prop it up: our name, our "biography", our partners, family, home, job, friends, credit card ... It is on their fragile and transient support that we rely for our security. So when they are all taken away, will we have any idea of who we really are? ~ Sogyal Rinpoche