#tender

You are pure-hearted, Branza, and lovely, and you have never done a moment's wrong. But you are a living creature, born to make a real life, however it cracks your heart. However sweet that other place was, it was not real. It was an artifact of your mam's imagination; it was a dream of hers and a desire; you could not have stayed there forever and called yourself alive. Now you are in the true world, and a great deal more is required of you. Here you must befriend real wolves, and lure real birds down from the sky. Here you must endure real people around you, and we are not uniformly kind; we are damaged and impulsive, each in our own way. It is harder. It is not safe. But it is what you were born to. (357) ↗

— Margo Lanagan

#dreams

As I read the Qur’an and prayed the Islamic prayers, a door to my heart was unsealed and I was immersed in an overwhelming tenderness. ↗

— Jeffrey Lang

#heart #humanity #inspiration #islam #jeffrey

...I lost my illusions in a black rain of bitterness - now what do you see in my eyes? How can you still love me? How can I be tender? ... ↗

— John Geddes

#despair #eyes #illusions #love #rain

Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write. ↗

— John Adams

#dare #kindly #knowledge #let us #means

He danced the way he made love, with passion and tenderness and spirit, communicating with hands and eyes the most subtle messages, tenderly making up for Lila's awkwardness. In his lashes and his hair, mist clung in tiny diamond drops. She could not take her eyes from him. ↗

— Ruth Wind

#dancing #lovemaking #tenderness #communication

I am proud only of those days that pass in undivided tenderness. ↗

— Robert Bly

#tenderness #humans

There is a time in a boy’s life when the sweetness is pounded out of him; and tenderness, and the ability to show what he feels, is gone. ↗

— Norah Vincent

#gender-stereotypes #loss #maleness #masculinity #tenderness

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard. ↗

— Ben Affleck

#bartender #college #dad #fifth #go

I don't run a car, have never run a car. I could say that this is because I have this extremely tender environmentalist conscience, but the fact is I hate driving. ↗

— David Attenborough

#car #conscience #could #driving #environmentalist

There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. ↗

— Robert Hass

#body #continuing #days #evenings #flesh