Kindness Quotes

“A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue.”

“When we feel the clown, when we have been played, if we have lived by heart, acted out of compassion, we are the substance of the play,rather than merely being played.”

“In Britain, we've tended to replace the kind of architectural culture valued in much of Europe with an in-flight magazine lifestyle - all branding, marketing and 'accessibility', a word that usually means dumbing-down.”

“HQ kind of hearkens back to that old method of watching live television, when you couldn't DVR it.”

“James Stewart was so kind and considerate and had such personal integrity.”

“The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other.I do not know what he sees, but I see eyes of surpassing tenderness and calm, a calm like the dignity of matter. I love the open ocean blue-grey-green of his iris, I love the curve of it against the white, that curve the sight of what has caused me to come, when he’s quite still, deep inside me. I have never seen a curve like that, except the earth from outer space. I don’t know where he got his kindness without self-regard, almost without self, and yet he chose one woman, instead of the others.By knowing him, I get to know the purity of the animal which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing, his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry–there is no worry, no pity, no graver radiance. If we are on our backs, side by side, with our faces turned fully to face each other, I can hear a tear from my lower eye hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth, and then the upper eye’s tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.I am so lucky that I can know him. This is the only way to know him. I am the only one who knows him.When I wake again, he is still looking at me, as if he is eternal. For an hour we wake and doze, and slowly I know that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other coming brought us to the edge of–we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, this place beyond the other places, beyond the body itself, we are making love.”

“My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family's table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with moral law, with his Jewish heritage, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka's work, which grows out of the nighttime dreamworld in Kafka's brain, is *more* autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka's, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There's an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer's work, the *smaller* its superficial resemblance to the writer's actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer's life become *impediments* to deliberate dreaming.”

“When you have a spinal or brain injury, or any kind of devastating illness, you kind of fall through the cracks in a sense. Your world implodes, and no one is really there to help pick up the pieces.”

“The question of desirable grief and pain or the necessity for it must also be faced. [Are] growth and self-fulfillment possible at all without pain and grief and sorrow and turmoil? If grief and pain are sometimes necessary for growth of the person, then we must learn not to protect people from them automatically as if they were always bad. Not allowing people to go through their pain, and protecting them from it, may turn out to be a kind of overprotection, which in turn implies a certain lack of respect for the integrity and the intrinsic nature and the future development of the individual.”

“People read stuff over your shoulder when you're in public, and when you write the kind of stuff I do, and people read it over your shoulder, it makes you a little self-conscious.”

“I attract a different kind of boy when my hair's red. I get more quality men - like a more thoughtful, nerdy dude.”

“I love to bake. There's something very ritualistic about it, kind of magic.”

“I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.”

“No matter who we are, where we live, what we look like, the circumstances of our birth or the situations we face; each of us has gifts within us. Strength, beauty, courage, compassion, hope, joy, talent, imagination, reverence, wisdom, love and faith are among them. They are not like material presents we unwrap and hold in our hands. We can’t see these gifts with our eyes. But they are real and powerful. When we open ourselves to them, they can enrich every aspect of our lives. They can help us transform challenges into opportunities and tragedies into triumphs. They can help us make a difference in the world.”

“I'm never really comfortable; I think it's kind of natural to feel uncomfortable, and I think if people say they are comfortable, they're just lying.”

“After the Republican Party did everything that Colin Powell says it needs to do to grow, and nominated the very kind of candidate he wanted in 2008, what did Powell do? He endorsed Obama! So according to the Drive-Bys and David Gergen, Republicans should let somebody who campaigned and voted for Obama, tell us how to build our party.”

“You talk about rowdy - in Oakland the players were on you. The refs were on you. The stands were on you. You had to talk back or you were a sissy; you'd get run out of the league. Afterward? Yeah, it was kind of a, uh, struggle to get out of the gym. Cops had to be everywhere. Which was lucky.”

“If I'm being honest, I think I'd be good at television; I just don't know if I am interested, because you are kind of geographically responsible to a location, and frankly I don't know if I retired from tennis so that I could sit around tennis tournaments 12 hours a day.”

“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin orcircles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwiseperfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivialinconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but(frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view”that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deepand destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worthand human recognition, the forced alienation of a person fromeven the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiorityputs rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented byinsult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority createsa person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments—scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can neverbe made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what isnormal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurther—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as aconsequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called apiece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficientlyloved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiencesand perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferiorin the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologicallypejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she isneedy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in andof itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Herpersonal experiences or perceptions are never credited as havinga hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never lovedenough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never lovedenough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible tofeel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior.” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarelylearns them all, even in one’s native language.”

“Is this what you do with your spare time?” he asked me, ignoring his sister.“What—are you deciding to talk to me now?” Smiling tightly, I grabbed a handful of mulch and dumped it. Rinse and repeat. “Yeah, it’s kind of a hobby. What’s yours? Kicking puppies?”