My Sympathies Quotes & Sayings

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories. — Susan Sontag

What is good looking, as Horace Smith remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,-generous in your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration. — John Greenleaf Whittier

I had a vivid imagination. Not only could I put myself in the other person's place, but I could not avoid doing so. My sympathies always went out to the weak, the suffering, and the poor. Realizing their sorrows I tried to relieve them in order that I myself might be relieved. — Clarence Darrow

My sympathies are, of course, with the Government side, especially the Anarchists ; for Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism . — Aldous Huxley

I now bid farewell to the country of my birth - of my passions - of my death; a country whose misfortunes have invoked my sympathies - whose factions I sought to quell - whose intelligence I prompted to a lofty aim - whose freedom has been my fatal dream. — Thomas Francis Meagher

On my way home, I ran into Miss Hartnell and she detained me at least ten minutes, declaiming in her deep bass voice against the improvidence and ungratefulness of the lower classes. The crux of the matter seemed to be that The Poor did not want Miss Hartnell in their houses. My sympathies were entirely on their side. — Agatha Christie

You've been playing on my sympathies as though they were harp strings. You-'
'What do you expect me to do?' he cut in. 'Play fair? With a woman who makes up her own rules as she goes along?'
'I expect you to take no for an answer!'
He rose. 'I should like to know what you're afraid of.'
'Afraid?' Her voice climbed. 'Afraid? Of you?'
'The only reason I can think of for your rejecting an opportunity to run the world as you see fit is fear that you can't manage the man offering the opportunity. — Loretta Chase

Unhand her," said a voice behind her. A voice she had never before thought she would be glad to hear. A voice that was commanding, strong and deep.
Her eyes popped open and she whirled around to find the duke standing right behind her. The man made a grab for her but the duke had already caught her waist and deposited her behind him.
"Let us go and I will not inform the authorities," the duke suggested.
The man sneered, "Lady in mine."
"Dear fellow, I would love to hand you over this young lady with all my sympathies, believe me. But my sister and my mother would have my head. She, you see, belongs to them. — Anya Wylde

Your brother kills you." Fett hopped tpo his feet as lightly as any unarmoured jedi apprentice, the n added," Some things are worsse thean death. I know that better than anyone, except maybe Sintas-and Han Solo. Send your father my sympathies. — Troy Denning

I suppose that my inner soul - my dual personality - had realized long before that Florence was a personality of paper - that she represented a real human being with a heart, with feelings, with sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note represents a certain quantity of gold. — Ford Madox Ford

Congratulations Lord Steldor, Princess Alera, my sympathies. — Cayla Kluver

I knew," he continued, "you would do me good in some way, at some time; - I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not" - (again he stopped) - "did not" (he proceeded hastily) "strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. People talk of natural sympathies; I have heard of good genii: there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My cherished preserver, goodnight! — Charlotte Bronte

Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress. — Benjamin Disraeli

My sympathies are Left. On paper and in the soul. But not in my heart or my guts. — Louis MacNeice

My sympathies have always been with the everyday people ... the center of my photography. — Jerome Liebling

My sympathies and my love went out to her, even as my hand had in the garden. I felt that years of the conventionalities of life could not teach me to know her sweet, brave nature as had this one day of strange experiences. Yet there were two thoughts which sealed the words of affection upon my lips. She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time. Worst still, she was rich. — Arthur Conan Doyle

My sympathies go out to the young performers today because they are under a microscope in a way I wasn't. Now everybody's got a camera phone and can record at will or take pictures of you. It's just a different world. I don't know how I would have fared back then. — Ricky Schroder

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn't floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.
Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture - exploit the new thing then move on.
There's a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.
Reading is where the wild things are. — Jeanette Winterson

I have no commiseration for princes. My sympathies are reserved for the great mass of mankind ... . — Henry Clay

I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences, but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate. — Sonia Sotomayor

Sport hunting is a crime. My sympathies are with the fox. — Wallis Simpson

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish. — Joyce Carol Oates

So I think I'd better go, said Wimsey. "I rather wish I hadn't come buttin' into this. some things may be better left alone, don't you think? My sympathies are all in the wrong place and I don't like it. I Know all about not doing evil tha good may come. I'ts doin' good that evil may come that is so embarrassin'."
"My dear boy," said the Rector, "it does not do for us to take too much thought for the morrow. It is better to follow the truth and leave the results in the hand of God. He can forsee where we cannot, because He knows all the facts. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The public is composed of numerous groups whose cry to us writers is: 'Comfort me.' 'Amuse me.' 'Touch my sympathies.' 'Make me sad.' 'Make me dream.' 'Make me laugh.' 'Make me shiver.' 'Make me weep.' 'Make me think.' — Guy De Maupassant

If I have learned anything in my long life it is to be grateful for every occasion when I followed my sympathies and avoided my antipathies. — Pearl S. Buck

My mother's sympathies were strongly with the Union. She knew that war was bound to come, but so confident was she in the strength of the Federal Government that she devoutly believed that the struggle could not last longer than six months at the utmost. — Buffalo Bill

Instead he gave Cabal his most professional pat on the shoulder. It was his best pat, the one that said, You have my most sincere albeit non-specific sympathies. It was all he could do. — Jonathan L. Howard

I want to be alone. Sympathies wasted on my hollow shell. I feel there's nothing left to fight for. No reason for a cause. — Sarah McLachlan

I thought that perhaps the most creative mix for a society would be nine parts solid worker from institutions like MIT to one part poet from Marrakech, but in spite of the fact that I myself had been trained to be one of the solid workers, which meant that all of my sympathies lay with that group, I would not surrender the poet. The problem was to find him. — James A. Michener

I always received much more satisfaction as a defense attorney in obtaining an acquittal for a client than I ever have as a D.A. in obtaining a conviction. All my interests and sympathies tend to be on the side of the individual as opposed to the state. — Jim Garrison

First and foremost, I would like to extend my deepest sympathies to the family of Michael Brown. As I have said in the past, I know that, regardless of the circumstances here, they lost a loved one to violence. I know the pain that accompanies such a loss knows no bounds. — Robert P. McCulloch

Your mother sounds like a formidable woman," Valek said into the silence.
"You have no idea," Leif replied with a sigh.
"Well, if she's anything like Yelena, my deepest sympathies," Valek teased.
"Hey!"
Leif laughed and the tense moment dissipated.
Valek handed Leif his machete. "Do you know how to use it?"
"Of course. I chopped Yelena's bow into firewood," Leif joked. — Maria V. Snyder

If Sally had been in an accident or come down with some overtly physical disease, I would not hesitate to tell him about it, confident that his sympathies would flow in my direction as a matter of course. But psychosis defies empathy; few people who have not experienced it up close buy the idea of a behavioral disease. It has the ring of an excuse, a license for self-absorption on the most extreme scale. It suggests that one chooses madness and not the other way around. (86) — Michael Greenberg

You are too kind, my lady. Indeed, you are the most amiable Englishwoman I have ever met."
She laughed. The viscount was rapidly rising on her list. "Some people don't find me amiable." Like a certain unfeeling Bow Street Runner.
He struck a hand to his chest. "I cannot believe that! You are such an alma brilhante ... a bright soul. How can anyone not see it?"
She grinned at him. "They must all be blind."
"And deaf." He tapped his temple. "And not very right in the head."
"Excellent, my lord," she said. "Your grasped that idiom quite well."
He looked surprised by that, then smiled. "I have to learn if I am to impress the senhora."
She cast him a coy glance. "And why would you want to impress me, sir?"
Picking up her hand, he pressed a kiss to it again and this time didn't release it. "Why would I not?" His wistful expression tugged at her sympathies.
"You'd better eat your eggs before they get cold," she said, gently withdrawing her hand. — Sabrina Jeffries

A multichild household is a pit of petty jealousies, this I knew, and the Nash children were panicking at the idea of competing not just with one another, but with a dead sister. They had my sympathies. — Gillian Flynn

I've changed in my sympathies since I've become a mother myself. In high school I went through a period where I was close with my mom and had to break with her in order to find myself and come back. Since that was my experience, that's often what happens in my books. — Sarah Dessen

Like many Americans my thoughts and prayers are with the people of London. My deepest sympathies are extended to those who lost a loved one in the recent terror attacks. — Doc Hastings

I have to express sympathy from the bottom of my heart to those people who were taken as wartime comfort women. As a human being, I would like to express my sympathies, and also as prime minister of Japan I need to apologize to them. — Shinzo Abe

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally," Eliot once wrote. "The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings, is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling erring human creatures. — Rebecca Mead

Holmes. "Why, it might be a description of Watson!" "It's true," said the inspector, with amusement. "It might be a description of Watson." "Well, I'm afraid I can't help you, Lestrade," said Holmes. "The fact is that I knew this fellow Milverton, that I considered him one of the most dangerous men in London, and that I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. No, it's no use arguing. I have made up my mind. My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will not handle this case." Holmes had not said one word to me about the tragedy which we had witnessed, but I observed all the morning that he was in his most thoughtful mood, and he gave me the impression, from his vacant eyes and his abstracted manner, of a man who — Arthur Conan Doyle

One as deformed and horrible as myself, could not deny herself to me. My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects ... with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being ... — Mary Shelley

Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

My sympathies have always been for working-class people. — Christa McAuliffe

Art, although produced by man's hands, is something not created by hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out of our soul ... My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the working of the soul. — Vincent Van Gogh