Tender Quotes

“Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“in the afterglow
of an evening rain

i lay down
in the grass
and think of you

my body aches
like an after-kiss

breaking in soft fires
and wildflowers

my dear,
i will always be
this tender for you.”
― Sanober Khan, A Thousand Flamingos

“I will never hurt you.
I will always help you.
If you are hungry
Ill give you my food.
If you are frightened
I am your friend.
I love you now.
And love does not end.”
― Orson Scott Card, Songmaster

“Let’s not wait until the light fades into irreparable loss, but let’s stay in the loop and pursue the momentous flow of daily little wonders, since life kindly tenders us gorgeous bouquets of sparkling colors, telling signs and rousing episodes. (“Côté cour…Côté jardin”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“i'm glad to be alive
in a world where
his gently awakening eyes
nourish the morning sun.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

“The bravest are the most tender; the loving are the daring.”
― Bayard Taylor

“love
wounds me
with soft pillows
with tender lips
and fingers”
― Sanober Khan, A touch, a tear, a tempest

“That deepest thing, that recognition, that knowledge, that sense of kinship began the first time I saw you,and it is the same now - only a thousand times deeper and tenderer. I shall love you to eternity. I loved you long before we met in this flesh. I knew that when I first saw you. It was destiny. We are together like this and nothing can shake us apart.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“I am metaphysical being, mystical and emotional, skeptical and cynical, happy and boisterous, loud and bawdy, quiet and melancholy, tender and cruel, full of mirth and despair. Inherent inconsistences mark me as part of nature, which is neither cruel nor fair, or reliable or predictable.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“Sometimes, silence works more intensely than a bayonet to slay a tender heart.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“I've climbed up here holding the hilt of time's sword by driving it into my tender heart.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling

“I made spasmodic efforts to work, assuring myself that once I began working I would forget her. The difficulty was in beginning. There was a feeling of weakness, a sort of powerlessness now, as though I were about to be ill but was never quite ill enough, as though I were about to come down with something I did not quite come down with. It seemed to me that for the first time in my life I had been in love, and had lost, because of the grudgingness of my heart, the possibility of having what, too late, I now thought I wanted. What was it that all my life I had so carefully guarded myself against? What was it that I had felt so threatened me? My suffering, which seemed to me to be a strict consequence of having guarded myself so long, appeared to me as a kind of punishment, and this moment, which I was now enduring, as something which had been delayed for half a lifetime. I was experincing, apparently, an obscure crisis of some kind. My world acquired a tendency to crumble as easily as a soda cracker. I found myself horribly susceptible to small animals, ribbons in the hair of little girls, songs played late at night over lonely radios. It became particularly dangerous for me to go near movies in which crippled girls were healed by the unselfish love of impoverished bellhops. I had become excessively tender to all the more obvious evidences of the frailness of existence; I was capable of dissolving at the least kind word, and self-pity, in inexhaustible doses, lay close to my outraged surface. I moved painfully, an ambulatory case, mysteriously injured.”
― Alfred Hayes, In Love

“The tender heart is never stone.
It beats and throbs--a jab--a moan--
With pulsing deep in muscle, bone,
It makes its own desires known.”
― Shellen Lubin

“Sadness is beautiful. It makes us warm and tender.
In those moments of vulnerability, we’re humble,
and transparent. We connect with our being. We experience self-compassion in its entirety.”
― Anoir Ou-chad, The Alien

“Sometimes rain, sometimes the darkness
leads you to light. Both opaque & tender.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”
― George Washington

“She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies”
― Lord Byron

“How the gentle ivy needs the brick walls to grow ...for the tender needs the strong...as a valley needs a mountain...as the flower needs a sun...”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“A few things that attract me to a girl - a sensitive and tender heart and a love for intelligent conversations.”
― Avijeet Das

“To remain tender through the lonesome years...to journey into the forgotten places and remember the forsaken love ...is to remain soft though the tides have left the shores.....”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“Dad?' 'Yeah?' 'Could you tell me a story?' 'Sure.' 'A good one.' 'As opposed to all the boring ones I tell.' 'Right.' I tucked my body incredibly close into his, so my nose pushed into his armpit. 'And you won't interrupt me?' 'I'll try not to.' 'Because it makes it hard to tell a story.' 'And it's annoying.' 'And it's annoying.'

The moment before he started was my favorite moment.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Beauty rises ...from a place of tenderness...for it is what pushes a human.... to be humane....”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“We were ready to submit the bid documents in sealed folders on May 28, at 10 am, as stipulated by the Ministry. Luckily, someone did a final check of our output against the ‘Invitation to Tender’ once more, just to make absolutely sure we hadn’t forgotten anything. He discovered at the last minute that the bid team leader had to initial all pages by hand. Since systems like DocuSign didn’t exist yet, Richard and I spent the whole evening and night signing pages, with me turning the pages and Richard initialing each one. There were thousands. Richard’s arm was hurting badly at the end of it, but we got it done in time. We put the folders in sealed envelopes and delivered it all by hand. One minute late and we would have missed an opportunity that we had already spent over USD 10 million on.”
― Ineke Botter, Your phone, my life: Or, how did that phone land in your hand?

“That tender place in you senses the tender place in me ...for words unuttered sound sweeter than what we could ever utter...”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“To remain tender after passing through years so lonesome, to journey into the forgotten place, to remember the forsaken love is to remain soft though the tides have left the shores......”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”
― Wells H,G, The Time Machine

“Giles’s heart stumbled at the closeness of her. He wrapped his arms about her and laid his chin atop her hair that held the faint scent of gardenias, ignoring the throbbing pain in his jaw and relishing the tender moment….”
― Grace Hitchcock, Hearts of Gold Collection

“We all carry a small catalog of unsealable wounds. Maybe these breaches of conscience that retain their power to sear are necessary reminders of our own boundaries. We touch them to remember. To prevent future transgression. But no sting compares to this one. It carved something out of me. A space that filled with the shocking light of how much I could hurt the person I least wanted to. It was the first love that made sense of the word "tender," which refers not only to a gentle feeling, but to the ache and vulnerability of loving someone. Which is not the same thing as protecting them.”
― Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs

“On the subway I felt I had a secret knowledge - I probably wasn’t the only one - a secret reason to travel, knowing that this exercise was ultimately for me, all these encounters brought with them lessons on how to live. And also how to shut up. In these years of increasing volume I had so many great reasons to stay quiet and bear witness.”
― Craig Taylor, New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time