#tenderness

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

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

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try. ↗

— Alice Walker

#because #been #believe #child #delay

Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table. ↗

— Alfred Hitchcock

#domestic #exquisite #homey #kitchen #kitchen table

Remember those black-and-white films with Frank Sinatra? Those guys looked like men and they were only 27! Listen to Otis Redding singing 'Try A Little Tenderness'. That was a man who understood what a man has to know in the world. Show me a real man now! Where are they? ↗

— Chrissie Hynde

#black-and-white #films #frank #frank sinatra #guys

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

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return. ↗

— George Eliot

#ease #ill #indifference #love #return