“He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.”

“As he’d slept one night, suffering from some nightmare, she’d gazed down at him with tenderness. Her chest had ached with feeling for him—as his continued to do for her. She’d smoothed hair from his brow, soothing him with soft words.”

“Herman Melville is not comforting. Emily Dickinson isn’t either. Maybe their work is too hungry for comfort, or just too vivid for comfort. But Henry James is – profoundly so. Because he is tender. The tenderness is there in the structure of the sentence. He knows the way the poor and the dead are forgotten by the living, and he cannot allow that to happen. So he keeps on writing for them, for the dead, as if they were children to be sheltered and loved, never abandoned.”

“When we abandon all to Him, He takes a tender care of us, and His Providence for us is great or small according to the measure of our abandonment.”

“The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep profoundly.”

“For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a creator toward his creature were, and that i ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness.”