#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

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

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

My biggest weakness is my sensitivity. I am too sensitive a person. ↗

— Mike Tyson

#biggest #i #i am #person #sensitive

Food is a fairly significant aspect of my life. I have struggled mightily with food. With my weight. And I'm conscious of it. So I have a sensitivity to people who struggle with their weight. ↗

— Tom Vilsack

#conscious #fairly #food #i #life

Sensitivity and money are like parallel lines. They don't meet. ↗

— Ang Lee

#lines #meet #money #parallel #sensitivity

Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#into #manhood #sensitivity

I urge calm and sensitivity to the fundamental civil liberties of our country. ↗

— Larry Craig

#civil #civil liberties #country #fundamental #i

Don’t fail through defects of temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to prevail over them and to get the mastery. Above all things else, be cheerful; there is no beatitude for the despairing. ↗

— Amelia E. Barr

#despair #determination #failure #hindrances #life