“Tender," she said again. "Tender is kind and gentle. It's also sore, like the skin around an injury.”

“The tenderness between two people can turn the air tender, the room tender, time itself tender. As I step out of bed and slip on an oversize shirt, everything around me feels like it's the temperature of happiness.”

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

“What she felt was a lighthearted sort of compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given.”

“...with the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched...”

“You have to be gentle with the young, W. says. They're a gentle generation, like fauns, he says, and require a special tenderness. Their lives are going to be bad--very bad--and, at the very least, we should be tender with them, and not remind them of what is to come.”