#listen

To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thought, can come to seem intrusive...After all these procedures the unbreachable mysteriousness of music remains intact. The book can never be more than an interruption. Afterward, the listening begins again, to generate, in turn, other and completely different books. ↗

— Geoffrey O'Brien

#listening #music #philosophy #imagination

The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way. ↗

— Tara Brach

#intimacy #kindness #listening #truth #vulnerability

I care about who you are, who you have been, who you want to be. I open myself to you to listen and learn about you. I cherish you, not just my fantasy of who you are, not just who I need you to be, but who you really are... ↗

— Betty Berzon

#love #love

Men hear loud voices, but they listen to strong words. ↗

— Toba Beta

#listen #loud-voices #strong-words #men

For a woman's words to wound would require a man to listen first! ↗

— Meredith Duran

#men #understanding #women #words #men

Fools talk, cowards silence , wise men listen ↗

— Carlos Ruiz Zafón

#listen #teach #men

I think that’s what Toni Morrison and Alice Walker understand, the secret language of women. That it’s not a secret at all; men just don’t know how to listen. ↗

— Marlon James

#listening #men #men-and-women #secret #toni-morrison

When someone tells you something big, it's like you're taking money from them, and there's no way it will ever go back to being the way it was. You have to take responsibility for listening. ↗

— Banana Yoshimoto

#money

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older ↗

— Lauren Oliver

#listening #pretending #acting

So many words get lost. They leave the mouth and lose their courage, wandering aimlessly until they are swept into the gutter like dead leaves. On rainy days, you can hear their chorus rushing past: IwasabeautifulgirlPleasedon’tgoItoobelievemybodyismadeofglass-I’veneverlovedanyoneIthinkofmyselfasfunnyForgiveme…. There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations. Shy people carried a little bunch of string in their pockets, but people considered loudmouths had no less need for it, since those used to being overheard by everyone were often at a loss for how to make themselves heard by someone. The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string. The practice of attaching cups to the ends of string came much later. Some say it is related to the irrepressible urge to press shells to our ears, to hear the still-surviving echo of the world’s first expression. Others say it was started by a man who held the end of a string that was unraveled across the ocean by a girl who left for America. When the world grew bigger, and there wasn’t enough string to keep the things people wanted to say from disappearing into the vastness, the telephone was invented. Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence. ↗

— Nicole Krauss

#love #poignant #courage