I wanted to live in Paris and write nothing but fiction and be perfectly free. I had decided all this had to be settled by the time I was thirty, and so I gave up my job and moved to Paris at twenty-eight. I just held my breath and jumped. I didn’t even look to see if there was water in the pool.
— Mavis Gallant
Revolutionary I Just Want To Be Held quotations
I want to be challenged I want to work and I want to feel that I am not being held back that there is something in front of me something more inspiring than just eating breakfast you know.

I think a man needs to be a man. To hold a woman the way she wants to be held. Just do whatever your woman wants, and you'll be fine.

Love is a true unconditional space to me.
To love someone or to be loved is to be seen, and I think, gosh, as humans, all we want is to be seen, to be heard, right? To be valued. To be respected. But mostly just to be held in a safe, unconditional space.
I want to see religious instruction and sermons held in German in the mosques.
The ideal, in my view, would be for imams to be trained in Germany and to speak our language, just as the Roman Catholic Church now holds mass in German and gave up Latin long ago.
Mr Hemingway does it extremely well. Nothing matters. Everything happens. One wants to keep oneself loose. Avoid one thing only: gettng connected up. Don't get connected up. If you get held by anything, break it. Don't be held. Break it, and get away. Don't get away with the idea of getting somewhere else. Just get away, for the sake of getting away. Beat it! "Well, boy, I guess I'll beat it." Ah, the pleasure in saying that

When I sit with students, I do not just want to help them solve their problems.
I want to find a moment with each person where their mind stops and their eyes open. I want us to be together as if we were lying in a field on the underside of the earth on a clear summer night, held only by the magnet of gravity, looking down into a bottomless sea of stars. I want us to remember together the beauty all around us.
Some of my best sources are ex-policemen, just to get a feeling of what it's like to be one. And it's quite different from being a civilian - except, of course, that I believe that policemen are just special sorts of civilians. Things like how hard it is to hold someone that doesn't want to be held. This is the kind of thing that is worth knowing.
And I said couldn't we be more moderate? And he said why? And I said because I care about the team. And he said, 'No Jony, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you, because I thought you really held the work up as the most important and not how you are perceived by people.' People misunderstand Steve because he was so focused.

David held up his hands. "Hold it. This is going nowhere. You two are both afraid, and being afraid makes you angry, and being angry makes you lash out." "Thank you, Dr. Laura," I said snippily. "I'm not afraid of her," Hunter said, like a six-year-old, and I wanted to kick him under the table. Now that I knew he was actually alive, I remembered just how unpleasant he was.
They held me and told me everything would be fine, that sadness would rise from our bones and evaporate in sunlight the way morning fog burned off the river in summer. My mother rubbed the kites on my hands and arms and told me to think of my lungs as balloons. I just want to feel safe, I said.
Forever in your arms Is where I want to be Holding you close Within the space That once held only me... Forever in your warmth The place for me and you I feel the sun Our life's just begun I know you feel it too