#sensitivity

Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic term, perhaps one with a nuance that flatters my readership's exquisite sensitivity. ↗

— William Safire

#especially #exquisite #feel #flatters #i

When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass. ↗

— David Sanborn

#bass #because #changes #degree #different

The vanity of men, a constant insult to women, is also the ground for the implicit feminine claim of superior sensitivity and morality. ↗

— Patricia Meyer Spacks

#claim #constant #feminine #ground #implicit

If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion. ↗

— Naguib Mahfouz

#look #move #moves #much #nothing

I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thoughts. By the time I was five, the migraines began. I was so sensitive about myself and the world that I cried or shriveled up at the slightest hurt. People always told me, "You've got to get a thicker skin," like now they might say, jovially, "Let go and let God." Believe me, if I could, I would, and in the meantime I feel like stabbing you in the forehead. Teachers wrote on my report cards that I was too sensitive, excessively worried, as if this were an easily correctable condition, as if I were wearing too much of the violet toilet water little girls wore then. ↗

— Anne Lamott

#sensitivity #worry #age

Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don't mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery. ...I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#literary-criticism #sensitivity #writing #age

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy. ↗

— Thornton Wilder

#insensitivity #poverty #education

I want to be president because I have the sensitivity, as a woman, to listen. I'm a different candidate... different because I don't belong to powerful, privileged groups, because I'm honest. ↗

— Josefina Vazquez Mota

#belong #candidate #different #groups #honest

Любовният ужас е сладък и опиянителен, но той има качествата на всеки друг ужас. Той разяждаше, сломяваше неумолимо волята му. И все пак между двете възможности — да не бе срещал Елена в живота си и състоянието, в което се намираше сега предпочиташе втората. Дори по-късно той искаше да преживее още веднъж мъчителната напрегнатост на тия дни, наситени с възторзи и съмнения, с усещането на щастие, което бе непостижимо, на сенки, които никоя светлина не можеше да разпръсне. ↗

— Димитър Димов

#sensitivity #love

Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect. ↗

— Lynne Truss

#sensitivity #respect