Tenderness Quotes

I suspect, however, that the thing that confuses you about Ian is that he's half Scot. In many ways he's more Scot than English, which accounts for what you're calling a ruthless streak. He'll do what he pleases, when he pleases, and the devil fly with the consequences. He always has. He doesn't care what anyone thinks of him or of what he does."
Pausing, Jordan glanced meaningfully at the couple who'd paused to look at a shrubbery on the front lawn. Ian was listening to Elizabeth intently, an expression of tenderness on his rugged face. "The other night, however, he cared very much what people thought of your lovely friend. In fact, I don't like to think what he might have done had anyone actually dared to openly insult her in front of him. You're right when you aren't deceived by Ian's civilized veneer. Beneath that he's a Scot, and he has a temper to go with it, though he usually keeps it in check."
"I don't think you're reassuring me," Alex said shakily.
"I should be. He's committed himself completely to her. That commitment is so deep that he even reconciled with his grandfather and then appeared with him in public, which I know was because of Elizabeth."
"What on earth makes you think that?"
"For one thing, when I saw Ian at the Blackmore he had no plans for the evening until he discovered what Elizabeth was going to do at the Willingtons'. The next I knew, he was walking into that ball with his grandfather at his side. And that, my love, is wha ~ Judith McNaught

How can you love me if you don't even know me?" He lifted my arms around his neck and placed his hands on the small of my back.
"I know you, Jade. You're witty and stubborn, like when you wanted to get rid of me at the bar in San Diego. And you're sweet and caring, like when you talked to my mother at the hospital. And you can drink like a sailor. " He chuckled. "And you hardly ever blush, but when you do it's like the sunshine." Then, he whispered in my ear with a husky voice, "And you make love with your soul."
Peter gave my earlobe a quick nibble. "I couldn't care less about energy. It might have brought us together, but I only care about you. I want to spend the rest of my days with you; no matter if it'll be ten or ten thousand."
Despite myself, I felt my eyes burn from tears I wasn't ready to shed.
Still, I couldn't say it.
"Peter..." I kissed him with all the tenderness I found in my heart and said, "the tub is about to
spill."
"Oh, shit." He jerked away from me, turned the water off and unplugged the tub, then hugged
me again with wet hands. "All we need is time, Jade. You'll see this love is real. ~ Denyse Cohen

The function of mindfulness is, first, to recognize the suffering and then to take care of the suffering. The work of mindfulness is first to recognize the suffering and second to embrace it. A mother taking care of a crying baby naturally will take the child into her arms without suppressing, judging it, or ignoring the crying. Mindfulness is like that mother, recognizing and embracing suffering without judgement.
So the practice is not to fight or suppress the feeling, but rather to cradle it with a lot of tenderness. When a mother embraces her child, that energy of tenderness begins to penetrate into the body of the child. Even if the mother doesn't understand at first why the child is suffering and she needs some time to find out what the difficulty is, just her acto f taking the child into her arms with tenderness can alreadby bring relief. If we can recognize and cradle the suffering while we breathe mindfully, there is relief already. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Oh, Timothy, how could you not have loved someone all these years? Loving absolutely seeps from you, like a spring that bubbles up in a meadow." "Maybe you can convince me of that, but I doubt it. I find myself niggardly and self-seeking, hard as stone somewhere inside. Look how I've treated you." "Yes, but you could never deceive me into thinking you were hard as stone. You've always betrayed your tenderness to me, something in your face, your eyes, your voice ..." "Then I have no cover with you?" "Very little." " 'Violet only wanted a friend,' " he quoted, " 'but every time she tried to have one, she did something that chased them away. ~ Jan Karon

Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes - love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. ~ Leo Tolstoy

But what I heard was a low insistent murmur, with pauses for reply in which no reply was made. It had a hypnotic quality that I had never heard in any voice: a blend of urgency, cajolery, and extreme tenderness, and with below it the deep vibrato of a held-in laugh that might break out at any moment. It was the voice of someone wanting something very much and confident of getting it, but at the same time willing, no, constrained, to plead for it with all the force of his being. ~ L.P. Hartley

Only when I dropped the notion that I was the creator of my own peace or oneness, or that I was powerful enough to change the world by acting to change others did I experience the way of tenderness. ~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

When we see everyone the way God sees them, all their frailties and weaknesses as well as their strengths,we can learn to treat them tenderly. ~ Laura Lane

He loved the soothing hour, when the last tints of light die away; when the stars, one by one, tremble through aether, and are reflected on the dark mirror of the waters; that hour, which, of all others, inspires the mind with pensive tenderness, and often elevates it to sublime contemplation. ~ Ann Radcliffe

You who have received so much love, show your love by protecting the sacredness of life. The sacredness of life is the greatest gifts that God has given us. ~ Mother Teresa

When women got into positions of power, they calibrated and recalibrated tenderness and strength, modulating and correcting. Power and love didn't often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go. ~ Meg Wolitzer

You win minds through your brilliance. You win hearts through your tenderness. You win souls through your benevolence. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Sometimes things acquire a tenderness, a monstrous tenderness we don't expect from them. ~ Herta Muller

A song of despair


The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot's dread, fury of blind driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There was thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
Pablo Neruda

[Hers] was an existence between heaven and earth ... beyond her
stretched as far as the eye could see ... an immense space of joys and
passions ... [But] did not love, like flowers, need a special soil, a
particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears cried into yielding hands ... the fevers of the flesh and the langours of tenderness ... ~ Gustave Flaubert

This is what it means to be loved ... when someone wants to touch you, to be tender ... ~ Banana Yoshimoto

Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly. ~ Gretel Ehrlich

A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them. ~ Victor Hugo

There's no one who's ever been significantly in my life for whom I don't have a sort of tenderness because they helped to shape who I am. ~ Rachel McAdams

Elron: These were happy woods. The entire place was happy from the house to the gardens to the woods. But this one little garden had something extra. It was excited. Something odd for plants and trees. They were prone to joy, happiness, sorrow and tranquility but not something as active as excitement. Someone had spent a lot of time here and a bit of their personality had seeped into the place. That someone was excited about life and probably young. Strange. Few youth of any race knew enough to transmit their feelings. The trees whispered about a person, moving and bending with change. The plants gossiped about tenderness shown them but the air breathed words of rage and despair in my ear. The plants didn't know gender but I got the impression of a woman, a young woman. The altar indicated she was a witch. A good witch. ~ N.E. Conneely

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the tribal groups of december trade
Seated in the figure of crocodile
And songs are sung and deals discussed, are made
Real. All ... For more than one reason they smile.
These codes are writ in secret, feeling fine
To keep what's private to my self since we
All must face our maker in our own ryhme
And reasons for being ( from regrets) free
So let the memory of your glory
Be the tenderness heartfelt love starkly
In the sky of my mind vast and pretty
Evermore glittering simplicity
Where in the truth of country grows sober
And sunshines through fog to radiate wonder ~ John Armstrong

Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

But looking at you was nothing like looking at those pictures. When I first saw," he said, looking down at her chest, then up again to meet her eyes, "it hurt, almost a physical pain. Since you finished chemo, you've gotten so strong again. Sometimes I almost forget what you've been through. But seeing your scars, they reminded me of your hurt. How you've been cut apart. What you gave up."

It was important, not keeping herself back from him, putting parts of herself off limits. But it stung when he sank down to brush his lips over the two biggest scars.

"But your scars are beautiful. I mean, I look at them, and I want to kiss, I want to touch, I feel this tenderness for them. You know how when you love someone, when you've been with them a long time and you know all the little lines and curves and planes of their body, how you look at little parts of them - the corner of their mouth, the back of their hand, the little crease where their earlobe meets their jaw - and you can feel like you're in love with that little piece of them? Maybe soon, I'll look at your scars like that. But right now, it's this feeling I've never had for a part of someone's body, before, because they promise me you're well. That you get to live. That we get to have a long life together."

Her love for him was swelling up in her chest, the way it did sometimes, an ache she wanted to hold on to. ~ Varian Krylov

Awaken your heart to kindness and mercy for the people and love and tenderness for them. Never, never act with them like a predatory beast which seeks to be satiated by devouring them, for the people fall into two categories: they are either your brethren in faith or your kindred in creation ... Do not ever say, 'I have been given authority' or 'My command should be obeyed.' Because it corrupts the heart, consumes one's faith, and invites calamities. ~ Ali Ibn Abi Talib

Before he could stop himself, Carlos pulled Michael down into a kiss, letting his lips and tongue communicate everything he'd been bottling up for days – months, if he was being honest with himself. Michael responded with a tenderness that begged to be answered, plying his mouth with soft, teasing kisses until Carlos pulled away, moving until their lips were a hairsbreadth apart.

"We don't have to stop," Michael whispered. ~ Sara Winters

For the first time in forever, he was stunned to silence. Not by her words, but by the tenderness in her hands, the worry in her eyes. He was an archangel. He'd been wounded far, far worse and shrugged it off. But then, there had been no woman with sun kissed by the sunset and eyes of storm gray to tear into him for daring to get himself hurt. ~ Nalini Singh

It would be something fine if we could learn how to bless the lives of children. They are the people of new life. Children are the only people nobody can blame. They are the only ones always willing to make a start; they have no choice. Children are the ways the world begin again and again.
"But in general, our children have no voice
that we will listen to. We force, we blank them into the bugle/bell regulated lineup of the Army/school, and we insist on silence.
"But even if we cannot learn to bless their lives (our future times), at least we can try to find out how we already curse and burden their experience: how we limit the wheeling of their inner eyes, how we terrify their trust, and how we condemn the raucous laughter of their natural love. What's more, if we will hear them, they will teach us what they need; they will bluntly formulate the tenderness of their deserving. ~ June Jordan

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

Jean-Yves looked up at his mother's face, her greying chignon, her harsh features: it was difficult to feel a rush of tenderness, of affection for this woman; as far back as he could remember, she had never really been one for hugs; it was equally difficult to imagine her in the role of a sensual lover, a slut. He suddenly realised that his father must have been bored shitless his whole life. He felt terribly shocked by this, his hands tensed on the edge of the table: this time it was irreparable, it was definitive. In despair, he tried to recall a moment when he had seen his father beaming, happy, genuinely glad to be alive. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Jensen, have you forgotten I'm a psychopath?"

Raising his head, he gazed into her eyes. "No, you're not. You're a little mixed up. That's all. Having your whole family die so suddenly probably accounts for the way you behaved.

The heartrending tenderness in his smoldering blue eyes startled her. Oh, my God. She had unwittingly given him a way to excuse Shelly's actions.

He stretched out beside her with a slow, sexy smile. His touch was light, teasing, as he brushed her lower lip with the pad of his thumb.

"Jenson, knock it off. I'm dangerous…honest."

"So am I. ~ Meryl Sawyer

Mother's tenderness toward my younger sisters caused more tears to pool in my eyes. I felt too old to be hugged and caressed by her, yet my body yearned for her touch; at least this once. I couldn't recall the last time she had shared the same warmth with me. The countless months of hardship had created an ocean of distance between us. It would be too awkward to hug her now. I sat across from her with tear-stained cheeks, wondering if she could feel my sadness and if she knew I loved her unconditionally. ~ Jennifer H. Lau

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things. ~ Marcel Proust

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined. ~ Ocean Vuong

We bear the sole, relentless tenderness. ~ Pablo Neruda

Hey you." She smiled and traced a finger on his cheek. "Where have you been?"
"Right here, always," Jack murmured, kissing her all over her face, her neck. But there was little time for tenderness ~ Melissa De La Cruz

And this is woman's fate: all her affections are called into life by winning flatteries, and then thrown back upon themselves to perish; and her heart, her trusting heart, filled with weak tenderness, is left to bleed or break! ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

How easily a fathers tenderness is recalled, and how quickly a son's offenses vanish at the slightest word of repentance! ~ Moliere

I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness. ~ Samuel Johnson

Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness ~ Oscar Wilde

Tenderness is not like money: the more you give to one, the more you have for others. ~ Winston Graham

I loved you too much, wanted you too much, had for you too great a tenderness. Now all of this is like a twisted root in my heart, a deadly poison in my brain. You have made of me a madman. You fill me with a kind of horror, a devastating hate that is akin to love – a hunger that is nausea. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

She was like me in lineaments
her eyes
Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;
But soften'd all, and temper'd into beauty;
She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,
The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind
To comprehend the universe: nor these
Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,
Pity, and smiles, and tears
which I had not;
And tenderness
but that I had for her;
Humility
and that I never had.
Her faults were mine
her virtues were her own
I loved her, and destroy'd her! ~ George Gordon Byron

A husband should always try to treat his wife with the greatest courtesy and respect, holding her in the highest esteem. He should speak to her in a kind and a soft manner, showing his love by word and deed. As she feels this love and tenderness she will mirror it and return it tenfold. ~ James E. Faust

With no sense of the passing of time, they held each other and lost themselves in the opening, unmasking tenderness that always comes after a satisfactory quarrel. ~ William Maxwell

You'll never experience the joy and tenderness of a lifelong love unless you fight for it. ~ Chris Fabry

We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends--- those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible and bereft of ties, --- even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice, --- even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its tress--- a mute friend, judge, and inspirer.
Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience.
All this may seem to you sheer sentimentalism; and indeed very few of us have the will or capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions.
There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp. ~ Joseph Conrad

A beautiful woman is a practical poet, taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope and eloquence in all whom she approaches. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed ... But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't. Either way, we're for it. ~ C.S. Lewis

Tenderness is the attempt to create a tiny artificial space in which it is mutually agreed that each will treat the other like a child. ~ Milan Kundera

Mm hmmm." His gaze dropped to her lips. "I missed ye." Lordy, he could melt marzipan with that sexy Scottish burr.
With a dip of his chin, he brushed a kiss across her mouth. Hot tingles spread down her back. Eva moved closer and pressed her body flush with his toned, muscular form. If they hadn't been born so many centuries apart, she could have believed they were made for each other, fitting together perfectly as if molded from the same clay.
Closing her eyes, she drank him in, allowing her senses to take over. Hot, spicy male kissed and held her in a tender embrace with arms that could crush a man, let alone her fine bones. Yet he cradled her with incredible tenderness. ~ Amy Jarecki

I resist the exhaustion, the sensitivity, my rounded belly and breasts. I resist, above all, the softness of pregnancy. Pregnancy is all curves and couches and naps, all tenderness and susceptibility. ~ Sarah Menkedick

He was a miracle to her. A reward after struggle. Safety after fear. Tenderness after disappointment. And ever since the first moment she'd met him, she felt as though Erik was the person the world had intended for her, for whom she was destined; the cool, doubting cynic whom she was somehow able to help transform into the warm, tender romantic who held her as he slept beside her. ~ Katy Regnery

Their lips met with a tenderness Kate had not dreamed possible. The weeks of heart-break and uncertainty, the pain of wasted days, and the despair of unfulfilled dreams released her like winter surrenders its ruthless grip on the frozen earth in early spring. Did every kiss hold such promise? ~ Jennifer Beckstrand

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

Twere better to be born a stone Of ruder shape, and feeling none, Than with a tenderness like mine And sensibilities so fine! Ah, hapless wretch! condemn'd to dwell Forever in my native shell, Ordained to move when others please, Not for my own content or ease; But toss'd and buffeted about, Now in the water and now out. ~ William Cowper

He thought of the grammar of Gaelic, in which you did not say you were in love withsomeone, but that you "had love toward" her, as if itwere a physical thing you could present and hold - a bundle of tulips, a golden ring, a parcel of tenderness. ~ Jodi Picoult

Sales is a business of relationships, and you must cultivate customers with tenderness and love, like cabbages in winter, even if the customer is an egomaniacal asshole you want to hit with a shovel. ~ Max Barry

With lines that show an unyielding dedication to craft, these poems are not afraid of meaning or the meaningful. More and more every day, the thinking American asks how she is to believe in love when there is war all about her, and in each of her deeply felt lyrics, Elyse Fenton confronts this question with the kind of tenderness one lover reserves for another. If every poem is indeed a love poem,Clamor is indeed a debut worth reading and about which we must make noise. ~ Jericho Brown

There isno feeling sadder or more hopeless than the coolingof a friendship between two men. Between a man anda woman a delicate web of terms and conditions is always negotiated. Between men, on the other hand, the deep sense of friendship rests on its selflessness: we expect no sacrifices, no tenderness from each other, all we want is to preserve a pact wordlessly made between us. Perhaps I was really the guilty one, because I did not know you well ~ Sandor Marai

To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from. I can't remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face. ~ Li-Young Lee

And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity. ~ George Eliot

You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses - remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can.

Sorrow comes in great waves - no one can know that better than you - but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.

My dear Grace, you are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness, it is not an end, or the end. Don't think, don't feel, any more than you can help, don't conclude or decide - don't do anything but wait. Everything will pass, and serenity and accepted mysteries and disillusionments, and the tenderness of a few good people, and new opportunities and ever so much of life, in a word, will remain. You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is not to melt ~ Henry James

And now in my tenderness of remembering it all again, I think I am still there with him too. I am there with all the others, most of them gone but some who are still here, who gave me love and called forth love from me. When I number them over, I am surprised how many there are.

And so I have to say that another of the golden threads is gratitude.

I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts. ~ Wendell Berry

Why must the female mind be tainted by coquetish arts to gratify the sensualist, and prevent love from subsiding into friendship or compassionate tenderness, when there are not qualities on which friendship can be built? Let the honest heart show itself, and REASON teach passion to submit to necessity; or, let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above those emotions which rather imbitter than sweeten the cup of life, when they are not restrained within due bounds. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

He kissed her temple, her hair, and then her mouth again, with great passion and heartbreaking tenderness. My Love ... from the beginning of time until the end. Always and forever. You'll always be my love. Always. ~ Patricia Ryan

Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good. ~ Victor LaValle

You deserve to be cherished, Sid, your body worshipped with tenderness ... "
"We have all night for that," she said in a sultry whisper she didn't recognize. The red-hot desire thrumming through her wasn't like anything she'd experienced before.
'I'm excellent at all night. ~ Robin Bielman

I've been able to see all that I've needed, my love: your kindness, your compassion, your tenderness, your love, and your soul. These are all I care about.
Of course you do and I don't expect anything different from you. But next time, I will give you more. You'll see the colours of every season. ~ Jacquie Underdown

Now they both smiled. The sweet, light fragrance of a first youthful, half-unspoken love, with all its intoxicating tenderness, had awoken in them like a dream on which you reflect ironically when you wake, although you really wish for nothing more than to dream it again, to live in the dream. The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give. They ~ Stefan Zweig

Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness. ~ E. M. Forster

Stockdale, a lonely young fellow, who had for weeks felt a great craving for somebody on whom to throw away superfluous interest, and even tenderness, was not sorry to join her ... ~ Thomas Hardy

You're still holding my arm."
"I know."
So this was it, she thought, and struggled to keep her voice. "Should I ask you to let go?"
"I wouldn't bother."
She drew a deep, steadying breath. "All right. What do you want, Roman?"
"To get this out of the way, for both of us."
He rose. Her step backward was instinctive, and much more surprising to her than to him. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"Neither do I." With his free hand, he gathered up her hair. It was soft, as he'd known it would be. Thick and full and so soft that his fingers dived in and were lost. "But I'd rather regret something I did than something I didn't do."
"I'd rather not regret at all."
"Too late." He heard her suck in her breath as he yanked her against him. "One way or the other, we'll both have plenty to regret."
He was deliberately rough. He knew how to be gentle, though he rarely put the knowledge into practice. With her, he could have been. Perhaps because he knew that, he shoved aside any desire for tenderness. He wanted to frighten her, to make certain that when he let her go she would run, run away from him, because he wanted so badly for her to run to him.
Buried deep in his mind was the hope that he could make her afraid enough, repelled enough, to send him packing. If she did, she would be safe from him, and he from her. He thought he could accomplish it quickly. Then, suddenly, it was impossible to think at all.
She tasted like heav ~ Nora Roberts

you look just like your mother

i guess i do carry her tenderness well

you both have the same eyes

cause we are both exhausted

and the hands

we share the same wilting fingers

but that rage your mother doesn't wear that rage

you're right
this rage is the one thing
i get from my father ~ Rupi Kaur

Love is nourished only by sacrifices, and the more a soul refuses natural satisfactions, the stronger and more disinterested becomes her tenderness. ~ Therese Of Lisieux

When we exaggerate our friends' tenderness towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own virtue. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

We are hungry for tenderness,
in a world where everything abounds
we are poor of this feeling
which is like a caress
for our heart
we need these small gestures
that make us feel good
Tenderness
is a disinterested and generous love,
that does not ask anything else
to be understood and appreciated. ~ Alda Merini

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

A touch communicates what can't be said. ~ Marty Rubin

Before I could reply, he had picked me up, literally swept me off my feet, and kissed me. And afterwards, when I tried to speak, he silenced me in much the same manner. It was a shock (but not at all distasteful) to be so caught up. Later - when he at last set me down - he handled me more gently. He took of my glasses and told me that he loved me. ~ Jennifer Paynter

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers. ~ George Eliot

I am wounded and begging, and it's now I who offers herself and clings; people don't hold onto me at all, for I have nothing to give them but myself, myself naked, and it will take a lot of time and tenderness before some resource, some source springs up in me. ~ Albertine Sarrazin

In after-years he would tell of an incident that took place at one of their encampments: "We were with the Prophet when a Companion brought in a fledgling that he had caught, and one of the parent birds came and threw itself into the hands of him who had taken its young. I saw men's faces full of wonderment, and the Prophet said: 'Do ye wonder at this bird? Ye have taken its young, and it hath thrown itself down in merciful tenderness unto its young. Yet I swear by God, Your Lord is more merciful unto you than is this bird unto its fledgling. And he told the man to put back the young bird where he had found it.

He also said: "God hath a hundred mercies,and one of them hath He sent down amongst jinn and men and cattle and beasts of prey. Thereby they are kind and merciful unto one another, and thereby the wild creature inclineth in tenderness unto her offspring. And ninety-nine mercies hath God reserved unto Himself, that therewith He may show mercy unto His slaves on the day of the Resurrection. ~ Martin Lings

It is a harsh world, indescribably cruel. It is a gentle world, unbelievably beautiful. It is a world that can make us bitter, hateful, rabid, destroyers of joy. It is a world that can draw forth tenderness from us, as we lean towards one another over broken gates. It is a world of monsters and saints, a mutilated world, but it is the only one we have been given. We should let it shock us not into hatred or anxiety, but into unconditional love. ~ Richard Holloway

Our soul is like a soft and gentle flower, it needs to be nurtured, cared for, tended to, with sufficient sunlight, fresh air and freedom to bloom into its most precious and beautiful form. This, my friend, is self-love. ~ Miya Yamanouchi

Tenderness and Rot
Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.
No lessons
can be drawn
from this however.
One is not
two countries.
One is not meat
corrupting.
It is important
to stay sweet
and loving. ~ Kay Ryan

If marriage is centrally an emotional union, rather than one inherently ordered to family life, it becomes much harder to show why the state should concern itself with marriage any more than with friendship. Why involve the state in what amounts to the legal regulation of tenderness? ~ Sherif Girgis

Rachel was a girl who depended on small, recurrent rituals - that was one of the things he'd come to know about her, and his very ability to identify so specific a trait made him proud of his own capacity for tenderness. ~ Richard Yates

Hay que ser duro pero jamas perder la ternura.
[It is necessary to be hard but never to lose the tenderness] ~ Ernesto Che Guevara

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness ... ~ Charles Bukowski

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I have great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness, especially in my own sex, yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength. ~ Anna Brownell Jameson

When I turned toward the hurt in the silence, I entered a kind of tenderness that was not sore, not wounded, but rather powerfully present.I sat up straight. The silence had tilled hard ground into soft soil. I sunk deep into the soft ground, where the source of life was revealed--wordless, nameless, without form, completely indescribable. And then--I dare to say it--I was 'completely tender.' To ease below the surface of my embodiment--my face, my flesh, my skin, my name--I needed to first see it reflected back at me. I had to look at it long enough to see the soft patches, the openings, the soft, tender ground. Would I survive the namelessness--without my body, without my heart--while engaging the beautiful, floral exterior of my life? Fear and caution were attempting to shut down the experience of uncoupling my heart from mistreatment and discrimination--from the disregard, hurt, and separation that I experienced and accepted as my one-sided life. I was going back to the moment before I was born, when I was connected to something other than my parents or my people. ~ Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Many messages are just thanking a stranger for a kindness ... I love those ones, because I imagine everyone else reading them feels encouraged by such examples of humanity and generosity and tenderness. And if they encourage us to reach out to strangers more often, that's a good thing. ~ Sophie Blackall

But please know, Jesus never lets you down. Please know that the love and tenderness of Mother Mary never lets you down. And holding on to her mantle and with the power that comes from Jesus love on the cross, let us move forward, always forward, and walk together as brothers and sisters in the Lord forward. ~ Pope Francis

And then I remember this morning and I wonder if it really happened or if I dreamed it. It was nice. And weird. And tender. I'm not used to tender. It's a fossil, that word. Conditions changed and it died out. Like the woolly mammoth. It just couldn't live in the same world as dick box. Ho dog. Or wiener cousins. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

He couldn't look back at the children. He couldn't think of it. All he could do was watch the eyes of his wife.
He pulled her to him, her body soft, her skin warm. She was life, she was his. He took her lips and tasted his freedom once more. The subtle tenderness. The hope hidden in joined breath. He took it into himself. Soaking in the peace that came with it.
And even as the rustling began he felt still, he felt calm. Scratching and scrapping within the stones, and the rustle of wings. But all Eli knew was the nature of love. ~ Rachel A. Marks

Abe grinned as Noah went in for the kiss. He'd expected laughing passion or maybe a raw lip-lock, but his hands cradling Kit's face, the guitarist kissed his new wife with a tenderness that had every single woman in the room sighing and all but melting into the floor.

Abe shook his head. "He really doesn't give a flying you-know-what about his bad-boy image does he?" he said to David.

David shot him a laughing look, his golden-brown eyes shining. with happiness for a friend who'd found his way out of the darkness that had haunted him for so long. "Says the man holding a baby and avoiding the F word. ~ Nalini Singh

Beauty comes from tenderness. ~ Katherine Center