|
bb7ee05
|
"If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."
|
|
personality
responsiveness
sensitivity
romanticism
promise
|
F. Scott Fitzgerald |
|
c4bfc10
|
You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.
|
|
individuality
reading
morality
learning
life
self-righteousness
issues
sensitivity
novels
society
insight
|
Azar Nafisi |
|
c87115b
|
" Courage moral and physical: 'anima'--the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd. Courage moral and physical: "anima"--the ability to visualize the mind and need of a man. Also a sense of the absurd."
|
|
men
courage
women
empathy
sensitivity
|
Christopher Hitchens |
|
442f3bd
|
Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect.
|
|
sensitivity
|
Lynne Truss |
|
635927d
|
"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."
|
|
sensitivity
worry
|
Anne Lamott |
|
58af360
|
The so-called sensitivity of neurotics develops along with their egotism; they cannot bear for other people to flaunt the sufferings with which they are increasingly preoccupied themselves.
|
|
suffering
neurotics
sensitivity
|
Marcel Proust |
|
165484c
|
Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird feeder.
|
|
sensitivity
nervousness
worry
|
Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
100055f
|
But centuries of time have not made me insensitive
|
|
feelings
time-and-change
sensitivity
|
Christopher Pike |
|
e092273
|
The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity.
|
|
writing-life
sensitivity
discipline
|
Annie Dillard |
|
de5625f
|
"Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, "with one skin-layer missing."
|
|
grief
loss
sorrow
sensitivity
intensity
|
Kay Redfield Jamison |
|
87844fc
|
She was herself unconscious of that faint hint of offishness which hung about her and repelled advances, an arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar irritation. They noticed her, admired her clothes, but that was all, for the self-sufficient uninterested manner adopted instinctively as a protective measure for her acute sensitiveness, in her child days, still clung to her.
|
|
personality
irritation
sociability
standoffishness
self-sufficiency
sensitivity
|
Nella Larsen |
|
99caef5
|
One was too sensitive,too raw,there were thorns and pin-pricks in so many words that in reality fell lightly on the air.
|
|
sensitivity
|
Daphne du Maurier |
|
de9385c
|
"Perhaps that was just a hunch." Barbee shivered again. He knew that he himself possessed what he called the "nose for news" - an intuitive perception of human motivations and the impending events that would spring from them. It wasn't a faculty he could analyze or account for, but he knew that it wasn't unusual. Most successful reporters possessed it, he believed - even though, in an age of skepticism for everything except mechanistic materialism, they wisely denied it. That dim sense had been useful to him - on those summer field trips, before Mendrick turned him out, it had led him to more than one promising prehistoric site, simply because he somehow knew where a band of wild hunters would prefer to camp, or to dig a comrade's grave. Commonly, however, that uncontrolled faculty had been more curse than blessing. It made him too keenly aware of all that people thought and did around him, kept him troubled with an uneasy alertness. Except when he was drunk. He drank too much, and knew that many other newsmen did. That vague sensitivity, he believed; was half the reason."
|
|
sensitivity
intuition
alcoholism
|
Jack Williamson |
|
76e28cb
|
This breakage within us is what makes us human and vulnerable. There is nothing more sinister than someone whose mind seems to be an absolute circle; there is a helpless coldness and a deadly certainty about such a presence.
|
|
spirituality
love
celtic-spirituality
humanness
sensitivity
vulnerability
longing
|
John O'Donohue |