Tenderness Quotes - Page 12

• Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

  Willa Cather

  Children, Blow, Hands

  Willa Cather (2010). “Vintage Cather”, p.174, Vintage

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• Not the least of the problems in clarifying one's consciousness is developing the stoic determination to criticize one's own softness or sentimentality toward oneself. Ego, self-solicitous about its own tenderness, is the ultimate policeman over its own false consciousness, dementedly uprooting every healthy seedling of insight into the truth. As Kierkegaard remarked, most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, but the real trick and task of life is to learn to be just the very opposite.

  Kenny Smith

  Life, Determination, Truth

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• The last, best fruit which comes to late perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard, forbearance toward the unforbearing, warmth of heart toward the cold, philanthropy toward the misanthropic.

  Jean Paul

  Kindness, Heart, Perfection

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• Melancholy had crept inside me. Small children made me cry, I got depressed eating meat, old book bindings awakened tenderness in me. Everything was disintegrating. Nothing stood the test of time, including me. Somewhere on the other shore were madness and God, sometimes both wearing a beard. Neither instilled much confidence.

  Mati Unt

  Depression, Children, Book

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• Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good.

  Victor LaValle

  Pain, Book, Loss

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• I tried to photograph the mysterious, true and magical soul of popular Spain in all its passion, love, humor, tenderness, rage, pain, in all its truth; and the fullest and most intense moments in the lives of these characters as simple as they are irresistible, with all their inner strength, as a personal challenge that gave me strength and understanding and in which I invested all my heart.

  Cristina Garcia Rodero

  Pain, Character, Passion

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• Royal Young has accomplished a rare feat in his fresh and riveting debut: he manages to recount his fascinating youth and unconventional family with a mixture of humor, scathing honesty and tenderness. Much more than simply a book about a kid who dreams of stardom, Fame Shark is a thoughtful, hilarious and moving love letter to his family and the Lower East Side of New York City.

  Kristen Johnston

  Love, Dream, New York

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• Love is illegal - but not hate. That you can do anywhere, anytime, to anybody. But if you want a little warmth, a little tenderness, a shoulder to cry on, a smile to cuddle up with, you have to hide in dark corners, like a criminal.

  Lou Jacobi

  Hate, Dark, Love Is

  "Fictional character: Moustache". "Irma la Douce", www.imdb.com. 1963.

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• Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.

  Susan Howe

  Children, Writing, Comforting

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• Geffrey Davis interrogates masculinity- as brother, son, father, lover-to examine the sources of love's enduring and failed aspects ... I admire Davis' emotional vocabulary, his attentive generosity and tenderness. Keep your eye on this gifted newcomer.

  Robin Becker

  Brother, Father, Eye

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• A Concordance of Leaves is an epic poem of the indomitable yet fragile human spirit. Philip Metres brings Palestine and Palestinians into English with rare luminosity. One feels echoes of Oppen's succinct tenderness in the depiction of the numerous characters of this work. Without other, there is no self. And that other is the stranger who must be loved. Concordance is, after all, a wedding poem-leaves and pages in search of a certain passage toward harmony.

  Fady Joudah

  Character, Epic, Echoes

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• Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Kings, Winter

  Henry David Thoreau (2008). “Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Journal, Reviews and Posthumous Assessments, Criticism”, W W Norton & Company Incorporated

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• I have felt the pain that arises from a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember what we are connected to and the delicacy of our relations. It is this tenderness born out of a connection to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply, there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our stories.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Pain, Moving, Writing

  Terry Tempest Williams (2015). “An Unspoken Hunger”, p.55, Vintage

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• Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.

  George Eliot

  Beauty, Lying, Curves

  George Eliot (2016). “The Mill on the Floss: Top Novelist Focus”, p.391, 谷月社

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• The mystery of life--its inexplicability, beauty, cruelty, tenderness, folly . . . has occupied the greater part of my waking thoughts; and in reverence or rage or irony, as the moment or situation might dictate, I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why.

  Theodore Dreiser

  Energy, Might, Waking

  Theodore Dreiser (1977). “Theodore Dreiser: a selection of uncollected prose”, Wayne State Univ Pr

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• Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears.

  Geneen Roth

  Lonely, Lying, Fall

  Geneen Roth (2011). “Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

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• In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Sacrifice, Self, Abuse

  "Ficciones". Book by Jorge Luis Borges, 1944.

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• You have a different kind of tenderness for everybody you know.

  Allan Gurganus

  Different, Kind, Knows

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• We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

  Anne Enright

  Art, Small Gestures, Body

  Anne Enright (2010). “The Gathering”, p.128, Random House

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• Beauty, sweet love, is like the morning dew, Whose short refresh upon tender green, Cheers for a time, but till the sun doth show And straight is gone, as it had never been.

  Samuel Daniel

  Sweet, Morning, Cheer

  Samuel Daniel (1855). “Selections from the Poetical Works of Samuel Daniel: With Biographical Introd., Notes, Etc”, p.6

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• My dearest dearest dear Albert sat on a footstool by my side and his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty... his sweetness and gentleness - really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a husband! to be called names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before - was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life! May God help me to do my duty as I ought and be worthy of such blessings.

  Queen Victoria

  Husband, Blessing, Names

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• Would a soul continually eye His everlasting tenderness and compassion...[then] it could not bear an hour's absence from Him; whereas now, perhaps, it cannot watch with him one hour.

  John Owen

  Eye, Compassion, Soul

  John Owen (2001). “Communion with God”, p.32, Sovereign Grace Publishers,

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• It was the month of May, the month when the foliage of herbs and trees is most freshly green, when buds ripened and blossoms appear in their fragrance and loveliness. And the month when lovers, subject to the same force which reawakens the plants, feel their hearts open again, recall past trysts and past vows, and moments of tenderness, and yearn for a renewal of the magical awareness which is love.

  Thomas Malory

  Heart, Past, Tree

  Sir Thomas Malory, Keith Baines (1962). “Le morte d'Arthur”

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• There is a particular quality of quietude and stillness that suffuses these painterly poems of Carol Ann Davis, so involved with loss, motherhood and the shifting tonalities of light that transform the domestic and ordinary into the strange and extraordinary that, combined with tenderness of address, approach the worshipful and make a number of these poems so moving and distinctive.

  August Kleinzahler

  Moving, Loss, Motherhood

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• From the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour.

  Julia Margaret Cameron

  Lenses, Firsts, Moments

  Julia Margaret Cameron, Anita Ventura Mozley (1974). “"Mrs. Cameron's Photographs from the Life": Exhibition Held 22 January-10 March 1974, Stanford University Museum of Art”

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