Elizabeth

“These are questions that begin with phrases like “How did you…,” “What’s it like…,” “Tell me about…,” and “In what ways…”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

“I’d say it’s because society sends the message that we shouldn’t show emotions, shouldn’t get personal; or it sends the message that if we show the world who we really are, people won’t like us. Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know. An insecure, self-protective world is a world with fewer questions.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“Better is it,” she thought, “to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others; better to be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are,” she said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, “contemplation, solitude, love.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography