“Yes, I hate orthodox criticism. I don’t mean great criticism, like that of Matthew Arnold and others, but the usual small niggling, fussy-mussy criticism, which thinks it can improve people by telling them where they are wrong, and results only in putting them in straitjackets of hesitancy and self-consciousness, and weazening all vision and bravery….I hate it because of all the potentially shining, gentle, gifted people of all ages, that it snuffs out every year. It is a murderer of talent. And because the most modest and sensitive people are the most talented, having the most imagination and sympathy, these are the very first ones to get killed off. It is the brutal egotists that survive.”

“Music calms the soul and improves the plasticity, flexibility, and sensitivity of the perceptual world.”

“If I have loved anyone truly it is you. You are the completeness of my incompleteness. You walked into my life and made me fall in love with life. I who was a wanderer in search of true love found the ocean of love in you. You came into my life like the rain to a parched desert. You made me understand the sensitivity and tenderness present within my own heart. You made a melancholy poet like me find the elixir of love. Your tenderness and sensitivity has now pervaded into the very pore of my being. Last night you made me inhale the fragrance of the moon. I love you. And I can’t love anyone else after you!”

“Sometimes I think,I need a spare heart to feel all the things I feel.”

“Being a Dream Girl is never going to be about what you look like or how much you weigh. After all, our physical appearances are just reflections of our inner worlds. What makes you a Dream Girl is your emotional sensitivity, your self-awareness, and your ability to communicate who you are effectively and compassionately in the world.”

“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”–it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No–Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.”

“The joy from eating does not come from the exclusivity of the food, but instead from the sensitivity that we eat it with.”

“A virtuos woman is not moved by big names and flamboyance, but only men of profound wisdom and integrity move her.”

“You don’t read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.”