Elizabeth

“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

“The experience of being listened to all the way on something—until your meaning is completely clear to another human being—is extremely rare in life.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“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

“You live through time, that little piece of time that is yours,” the novelist Robert Penn Warren wrote, “but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours….What you are is an expression of History.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen