#tenderness

Tucker strokes my hair. There's something so tender about the gesture. It might as well have been him whispering I love you. ↗

— Cynthia Hand

#hair #love #tenderness #tucker #love

The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#becomes #insupportable #love #love is #most

Falling in love was easy-when romantic attraction was combined with hungry, unsated desire, they formed a glamorous, glittering bauble as fragile as it was alluring, a bauble that could shatter as soon as it was grasped. Tenderness was a different story. It had staying power and the promise of a future. ↗

— Robyn Donald

#poetry #tenderness #romantic

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who'll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you're in the wrong house, that's what it means. ↗

— Henny Youngman

#affection #come #do you know #give #home

As she stooped over him, her tears fell upon his forehead. The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection he had never known; as a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or even the mention of a familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; and which some brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have awakened, for no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall them. ↗

— Charles Dickens

#memory #tenderness #dreams

Tenderness is a virtue. ↗

— Oliver Goldsmith

#virtue

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity. ↗

— George Eliot

#death #never #our #repent #severity

I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being. ↗

— Edward Gibbon

#desire #female #friendship #happiness #her

My father couldn't warm my frozen hands. ↗

— Tahereh Mafi

#hurt #love #shatter-me #tenderness #love

He had tenderness in his heart — ‘a soft place,’ as Nicholas Higgins called it; but he had some pride in concealing it; he kept it very sacred and safe, and was jealous of every circumstance that tried to gain admission. But if he dreaded exposure of his tenderness, he was equally desirous that all men should recognize his justice; and he felt that he had been unjust, in giving so scornful a hearing to anyone who had waited, with humble patience, for five hours, to speak to him. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#tenderness #vulnerability #equality