No Defenses Quotes

Love is no inoculation against murder. ~ N.K. Jemisin

He had no secrets left. No defenses. He had nothing, except that same vast, dark, empty, infinite ache that had resided in him for as long as he could remember. An endless flight of stairs, leading down and down into the cold, dark pit of his soul. Now, at long last, he'd reached the absolute rock bottom. And there she was, just standing there. She'd been there all along. ~ Tessa Dare

I was sorry that I'd told him, but I had no defenses anymore. I could not lie, even for the best of reasons; there was simply no place to go, nowhere to hide. I felt beset by whispering ghosts, their loss, their need, their desperate love pulling me apart. Apart from Jamie, apart from myself. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Hostage? She's holding me hostage. She has my guts in her hands. I don't care about the company, I care about her. She's my life, do you understand? Have you ever loved a woman? Have you ever held her at night so tight because you couldn't sleep thinking something might happen to her? Have you ever built a future around a woman? Ever thought of every tomorrow, every year, every decade with her? Dreamed of your old age holding her hand? I can only function with her in my life. I can only breathe if I know she's there. I gave her my fucking soul and she threw it away. Months ago, maybe years ago. She made a decision to throw me away. She's prepared for this divorce, and I'm swinging in the wind. Raw. With nothing. No defenses. Now what am I supposed to do?" I stood and threw my coat over my shoulders. "This is not about money. It's not about some publishing company. Not for me. If I don't do this, I have no chance of recovery. I'm as good as dead." ~Adam ~ C.D. Reiss

World-wide warming moved tropical diseases into northern areas which had no defenses against them. ~ Nancy Kress

Dalek: I will talk to the Doctor.
The Doctor: Oh will you? That's nice. Hello!
Dalek: The Dalek strategem nears completion. The fleet is almost ready. You will not intervene.
The Doctor: Oh really? Why's that, then?
Dalek: We have your associate. You will obey or she will be exterminated.
The Doctor: No.
Dalek: Explain yourself.
The Doctor: I said, "No."
Dalek: What is the meaning of this negative?
The Doctor: It means, "No."
Dalek: But she will be destroyed!
The Doctor: No! 'Cause this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna rescue her. I'm gonna save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet, and then I'm gonna save the Earth. And then - just to finish off - I'm gonna wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!
Dalek: But you have no weapons, no defenses, no plan.
The Doctor: Yeah! And doesn't that scare you to death? Rose?
Rose: Yes, Doctor?
The Doctor: I'm coming to get you. ~ Russell T. Davies

The thing about great poetry is we have no defenses against it. ~ David Whyte

It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger that causes anxiety. ~ Robert Kegan

Many of our flaws are old emotional defenses which may fade away when we're loved in spite of them. ~ Rick Cormier

If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds. ~ John Bertram Phillips

Time passed: the mind rebuilds it's defenses. ~ Stephen King

The worst thing was that even if you did your own job, if your teammate failed to do theirs, you could be blown away along with them. And yet, if you focused only on strengthening your own defenses, someone else could get killed. All we could do was trust our teammates, and those who failed were mercilessly culled. We'd been thrown into an extreme situation that was just like the front lines. In the end, we barely slept at all. ~ Carlo Zen

He'd imprisoned himself in this castle to rot. He'd cut off all contact with the outside world. And just when he thought he'd burned all his bridges, this woman - this impossible, sweet, foolish woman - arrived, determined to swim the moat. Breach his defenses. Make a home. Stay. ~ Tessa Dare

The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she'd caught him staring.
For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman's beauty.
She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.
He could have lived with this if only he'd kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew. ~ Sherry Thomas

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. ~ Betsy Lerner

If you want to know when a war might be coming, you just watch the U.S. and see when it starts cutting down on its defenses. It's the surest barometer in the world. ~ Will Rogers

Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all. ~ Stephen King

One of the ego's main defenses against doing so (experiencing our Essence)is the belief that spirituality is something rarefied, impractical, and very far away. In fact, it is closer than we think, as the mystics assure us: we do not have to go anywhere or accomplish anything. What we must learn is to stop running away from ourselves . . . The good news is that you are already here: your Essence already exists entirely and perfectly . . . We do not need to learn something new or anything to be our True Nature. Spiritual progress involves seeing what is right under our noses - really, what is right under the layers of our personality. Spiritual work is therefore a matter of subtraction, of letting go, rather than of adding anything to what is already present. ~ Don Richard Riso

..you can't just break through a person's defenses like thatl the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse. ~ Raphael Carter

We don't need a head of state who guts our defenses and draws phony red lines with a pink crayon. ~ Oliver North

We don't realize how much the NFL is quietly drifting towards flag football. During the '80s, part of the defense's goal was to put the fear of God into offensive players ... that's fading away. ~ Bill Simmons

Good art wounds as well as delights. It must, because our defenses against the truth are wound so tightly around us. But as art chips away at our defenses, it also opens us to healing potentialities that transcend intellectual games and ego-preserving strategies. ~ Rollo May

Most people will see declining returns [due to inflation]. One of the great defenses if you're worried about inflation is not to have a lot of silly needs in your life - you don't need a lot of material goods. ~ Charlie Munger

I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life. ~ Marie Calloway

What was the pain? Damaged units of his body, breaks in his defenses against the outside world. The barriers needed repairing, the damaged units must be broken down and dispersed. Nothing must get in the way of this task. All his resources should be put to it. His body demanded this of him, and pain was the alarm that sounded through him. ~ Robin Hobb

To love is to willingly lower our defenses, a terrifying prospect any time and place but especially so at a time and in a place where we perceive ourselves as having so much (HIV; violence; social; cultural; environmental degradation) to defend ourselves against. To love is to give oneself to another, to entrust to someone else a power that all good sense would have us reserve to ourselves. So we give away some part of ourselves, to find that part returned to us tenfold, in ways we could never have predicted and cannot rationally understand. Loaves and fishes. Miracles happen. ~ Fenton Johnson

And then, without any warning at all, he presses his lips against mine.
As his mouth covers my own, I find myself reeling, as if I have been tipped backward and am falling, falling, so that even the stars in the sky are spinning. His lips are warm and soft, the unrelenting pull of his desire for me as strong as the pull of the waves against the sand.
It is not like practicing with Ismae, or even Sybella. It is not like any of the first kisses I have imagined over the years. It is far, far better and more wondrous, and yet terrifying as well, like one of the raging storms that pound against the convent walls in the winter, threatening to breach its defenses. So too does this kiss threaten something deep within me that I cannot even name. ~ Robin LaFevers

I could say 'I love you' - and I do." Raising his lids, he met her gaze. "But it's not that simple… not for me. I never wanted a wife." He drew in a breath. "I never wanted to love - not you, not any woman. I never wanted to risk it - never wanted to be forced to find out if I could handle the strain. In my family, loving's not easy - it's not a simple sunny thing that makes one merely happy. Love for us - for me - was always going to be dramatic - powerful, unsettling - an ungovernable force. A force that controls me, not the other way about. I knew I wouldn't like it - " His eyes met hers. "And I don't. But… it isn't, it appears, something I have a choice about."

His lips twisted. "I thought I was safe - that I had defenses in place, strong and inviolable, far too steely for any mere woman to break through. And none did,"not for years." He paused. "Until you.

"I can't remember inviting you in, or ever opening the gates - I just turned around one day and you were there - a part of me." He hesitated, studying her eyes, then his face hardened, his voice deepened. "I don't know what will convince you, but I won't ever let you go. You're mine - the only woman I could ever imagine marrying. You can share my life. You know a hock from a fetlock - you know as much about riding as I do. You can be a partner in my enterprises, not a distant spectator standing at the periphery. You'll stand at the center of it all, by my side. ~ Stephanie Laurens

Our prejudices, our antipathies, are our natural defenses against what we could not assimilate. ~ Natalie Clifford Barney

I grew up Catholic, so I have these defenses about listening to anything with too much religiosity; some of the lyrics didn't sit well in my mouth. One of my beefs is the patriarchal setup. Having the 'he, he, he, God, God, God, king, king, king' stuff was hard for me. ~ Patty Griffin

The Chosen One is often told that failure is not an option. The Dark Lord knows that failure, like hurt and harm, is one not simply an option, but one of many companions. True power seldom comes without risk. Sufficient risk eventually results in harm. If you think you can trap a thousand demons and never have a single one break through your defenses and wreak havoc on your mind for a while - then you've likely never summoned any demons at all. ~ Jeff Mach

One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it. ~ Thomas Sowell

Pain....it let's you know your alive. It lets you know that you truly loved. Dealing with it is never easy. It breaks through your defenses and brings you crashing down. Cry the tears that need to come and once your done, pick up the pieces and try and put them back together. It will not be easy, but this is how life is. ~ Earle Adam Lindsay

But he who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose. ~ Anne Bronte

The firmest security of peace is the preparation during peace of the defenses of war. ~ John Quincy Adams

Self-defenses mean self-defense, period. It leave nothing out. ~ Bohdi Sanders

Trust allows you to follow your feelings through your defenses to their sources, and to bring to the light of consciousness those aspects of yourself that resist wholeness, that live in fear. ~ Gary Zukav

The source of violence is in our heads. As it would not be appropriate to ignore "just a little" cancer in the body, so it is not appropriate for us to ignore "just a little" violent thinking. A little cancer, unchecked, turns into a monstrous killer. So do small, insidious, seemingly harmless judgmental thought forms become the pervasive cancers that threaten to destroy a society. As the body's defenses against cancer center around a healthy immune system, our chief defense against violence in America is our own individual efforts to cleanse our minds of violent thinking. Each and every one of us tends to be angrier and less tolerant of others than we know in our hearts that we should be. ~ Marianne Williamson

Judo is the way to the most effective use of both physical and spiritual strength. By training you in attacks and defenses it refines your body and your soul and helps you make the spiritual essence of Judo a part of your very being. In this way you are able to perfect yourself and contribute something of value to the world. This is the final goal of Judo discipline. ~ Kano Jigoro

Historian Larry Hise notes in his book Pro-Slavery that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He listed 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals. ~ James A. Haught

Satan knows that the nature of humankind is to act out of how we feel rather than what we know. One of our most important defenses against satanic influence will be learning how to behave out of what we know is truth rather than what we feel. ~ Beth Moore

The guardians of your company's cyber security should be encouraged to network within the industry to swap information on the latest hacker tricks and most effective defenses. ~ Nina Easton

I'm now requesting you refrain from calling me this early in the morning, before I've had a chance to steel my defenses against hearing you utter the word 'lizard.'"

-- spoken by Dr. Jeri Asheer... to Chris Dixon. ~ Richard Finney

When things get personal, we need to resist the natural male instinct to run for cover, man the defenses, or--worst of all--reach for the big guns. Much better to set aside our natural defensiveness and focus on listening well even though we feel under attack. Because we're probably not. ~ Jeff Feldhahn

My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn't know how to cry. Simple. ~ John Lennon

Childhood trauma can range from having faces extreme violence and neglect to having confronted feelings of not belonging, being unwanted, or being chronically misunderstood. You may have grown up in an environment where your curiosity and enthusiasm were constantly devalued. Perhaps you were brought up in a family where your parents had unresolved traumas of their own, which impaired their ability to attend to your emotional needs. Or, you may have faced vicious sexual or physical attacks. In all such situations, you learn to compensate by developing defenses around your most vulnerabe parts. ~ Arielle Schwartz

These past couple of weeks, I'd scaled Kelly's massive wall and peeked at what lay beyond. But I'd made myself too comfortable, and he'd tossed me back out, stacked his defenses thicker and taller and coiled it with a halo of concertina wire. ~ Cara McKenna

To be fair, you can tell me what you think of me," Max offered. "I didn't mean to offend you. I was just making a few observations."
"How could I possibly know enough about you to make a proper judgment?" His tone was harsher than he'd anticipated. "You've taken a stranger into your home without so much as a second thought and offered everything but your bed. Crazy comes to mind. Suicidal maybe."
Max leaned forward in her chair, readying her defenses. "Excuse me?"
"I don't mean to sound ungrateful here but please remember that you don't know me. I appreciate all that you've done but that doesn't entitle you to judge me."
"I wasn't judging you," she bit back. "But maybe you're right. I don't think I thought this through at all. ~ Shawn Kirsten Maravel

I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart. ~ Hermann Hesse

I'm not sure anyone's ever experienced enlightenment, been born again, been called to repentance or decided to sell their belongings on account of a system. The voice, the tale, the image, the parable that gets through to you
that wins your heart
religiously is the one that makes it past your defenses. You've been won over, and you probably didn't see it coming. You've been enlisted into a drama, whether positively or negatively, and it shouldn't be controversial to note that it happens all the time. When you really think about it, there's one waiting around every corner. It's as near as the story, song or image you can't get out of your head. Religion happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out or compelled by something outside ourselves. It could be a car commercial, a lyric, a painting, a theatrical performance or the magnetic pull of an Apple store. The calls to worship are everywhere. ~ David Dark

The things most people need to learn in therapy are related to attachment, abandonment, love, and fear. We are trying to access basic emotional processes that are organized in primitive and early-developing parts of the brain. The language of these emotions is also very basic; it is the language of childhood. The more complex the language and ideas you bring into therapy, the more likely you are to stimulate your clients' intellectualizing defenses. ~ Louis Cozolino

To not give your foe the respect that he is due gives him an opening in your defenses that he can exploit. ~ Terry Mancour

You have to drop all your defenses, only then is intimacy possible. We are all hiding a thousand and on things, not only from others but from ourselves. ~ Rajneesh

Common sense told us that to preserve the peace, we'd have to become strong again after years of weakness and confusion. So, we rebuilt our defenses, and this New Year we toasted the new peacefulness around the globe. Not only have the superpowers actually begun to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons ... but the regional conflicts that rack the globe are also beginning to cease. ~ Ronald Reagan