Sympathetically Quotes & Sayings

With vivid memories of the last IRS form I had signed, I agreed sympathetically that a two percent tax rate was a positive outrage, wondering to myself just what had become of the fiery spirit of American taxpayers over the intervening two hundred years. — Diana Gabaldon

We were interrupted by a girl with a strawberry birthmark on her nose; she had some papers in her hand and asked if we had signed the petition for the imprisoned Argentinean comrades. Belbo signed without reading it. "They're even worse of than I am," he said to Diotallevi, who was regarding him with a bemused expression. "He can't sign," Belbo said to the girl. "He belongs to a small Indian sect that forbids its members to write their own names. Many of them are in jail because of government persecution." The girl looked sympathetically at Diotallevi and passed the petition to me.
"And who are they?" I asked.
"What do you mean, who are they? Argentinean comrades."
"But what group do they belong to?"
"The Tacuarus, I think."
"The Tacuarus are fascists," I said. As if I knew one group from the other.
"Fascist pig," the girl hissed at me. She left. — Umberto Eco

A child can identify with adult characters- but only if they are sympathetically drawn and simple enough. — Edmund Wallace Hildick

Hey, things like that happen at the Academy too," I insisted, almost triumphantly. "Last year the freezers failed so there was no ice for" - the wind went out of my sails as I realized how lame this was going to sound - "the sushi bar." He nodded sympathetically. "You guys should get T-shirts made. You know: I Survived the Sushi Crisis. — Gordon Korman

Dex rubbed his fingers over the stubble on Sloane's jaw when he heard it. Wait, was that ... . No, it couldn't be. Could it? He discreetly lowered his gaze to Sloane's, meeting his lover's wide eyes and confirming Dex wasn't hearing things. "Holy shit, you're purring!" Sloane bolted up right, turning to stare at Dex. "I was, wasn't I?" "I take it that's sort of a new thing for you." "I ... I've never done that before. Not while Human anyway. I didn't even know I could do that. I shouldn't be able to do that! It's ... ." Sloane looked like he was at a loss for words. "A little creepy?" Dex offered sympathetically. Sloane nodded. — Anonymous

I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much. — Lionel Blue

I can't go back to being who I used to be!'
Hadley looked down at him sympathetically.
'None of us can, kid.' he said. 'That's the point. You get what you get. Life changes you. Time travel or no, you always have to build on what you live through. — Margaret Peterson Haddix

Upon returning home, I asked a Parisian friend who lives near me how she does it. How does she manage to adjust to our grocery stores and our food when she comes back from Paris? I was having a heck of a time with it. She shook her head sympathetically and said, "I remember one time I came back to the States. I went to the grocery store. I stood in the aisles. And I cried. I literally cried. — Karen A. Chase

I would think it odd, he said, that he had never married. I did not, in fact, think it at all odd
the statistical chances against any woman being prepared to endure both the hairiness of his legs and the tedium of his conversation seemed to be negligible. I did not express this view, but said sympathetically that the military life must be difficult to combine with the domestic. — Sarah Caudwell

That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift. When I cried inconsolably through my first hour of life, my tears were her inspiration. Shaking her head sympathetically at Mother, the fairy touched my nose. "My gift is obedience. Ella will always be obedient. Now stop crying, child."
I stopped. — Gail Carson Levine

Once the state starts providing, it feels free to hand out the rules, too!" Larch blurted hastily.
... "In a better world ... " she began patiently.
"No, not in a better world!" he cried. "In this one
in this world. I take this world as a given. Talk to me about this world!" ...
"Oh, I can't always be right," Larch said tiredly.
"Yes, I know," Nurse Caroline said sympathetically. "It's because even a good man can't always be right that we need a society, that we need certain rules
call them priorities, if you prefer," she said ...
Always in the background of his mind, there was a newborn baby crying ... And they were not crying to be born, he knew; they were crying because they were born. — John Irving

We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group. — Meryl Streep

Truth came home one day, naked and wounded, having been beaten and cursed by the people who did not wish to hear, while his brother Falsehood went dressed in the brightest garments and feasted with every household.
"What shall I do?" cried Truth to the gods. "No man wishes to hear me and all beat me and throw things at me; look, I am covered with dung."
"You are naked" said the goddess Maat, sympathetically. "No naked one can command respect. Therefore take these robes and you will walk without fear and all men will sit at your feet to hear your stories." And she dressed Truth in Fable's garments, and he was welcome at every house. — Kerry Greenwood

Typical of Hell, thought Chen: overdone and ostentatious and overwhelming, designed to cow an already beaten populace.
"Wow" he said. The demon grinned sympathetically.
"It is a bit excessive, isn't it?"
"Who does it belong to?"
"My employer is the First Lord of Banking. Head of the Ministry of Wealth. — Liz Williams

You know what I'm thinking?' Maggie said. I had no idea. 'Nope,' David replied. Apparently David didn't know either. Maggie turned to me with pleading eyes.'Our babysitter has the flu.' 'I'm sorry to hear that,' I replied. Dead silence. I honestly had no idea what Maggie was getting at, so I misread the silence. 'It's not serious, I hope,' I said sympathetically. — Lisa Lutz

She tried to smile sympathetically, but with her face it wasn't quite possible. — Anthony Horowitz

It is one of the secrets of Nature in its mood of mockery that fine weather lays heavier weight on the mind and hearts of the depressed and the inwardly tormented than does a really bad day with dark rain sniveling continuously and sympathetically from a dirty sky. — Muriel Spark

Remember, empathy need not lead to sympathetically giving in to the other side's demands - knowing how someone feels does not mean agreeing with them. — Daniel Goleman

I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I've always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch. I could hear the tale, how everyone would love — Gillian Flynn

Family members are often just frustrated that, no matter how hard they try to provide companionship, take care of chores, and so forth, they can't replace the person who's gone," Amanda-Lee said sympathetically. "When the grieving spouse talks about that person, the children and grandchildren take it as a complaint or a signal that they're not doing a good enough job. The reality is
that the grieving spouse just needs someone to talk to, someone to reminisce with. — Lisa Wingate

If ever we needed in this country to adopt a new attitude towards homosexuality, this is the time. Instead of treating it as a crime, and driving it underground, we ought to recognize it for what it is: it's a mental illness, it's a psychiatric condition which ought to be treated sympathetically by psychiatrists and social workers. — Tommy Douglas

Most bad books get that way because their authors are engaged in trying to justify themselves. If a vain author is an alcoholic, then the most sympathetically portrayed character in his book will be an alcoholic. This sort of thing is very boring for outsiders. — Stephen Vizinczey

My mom beat me up, I informed my reflection. It looked back sympathetically. — Richelle Mead

Alaythia smiled sympathetically. "The Coast of the Dead. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?"
Simon tried to smile back. "Someone in a good mood named that place. — Jason Hightman

Soul and body, I suggest react sympathetically upon each other. A change in the state of the soul produces a change in the shape of the body and conversely, a change in the shape of the body produces a change in the state of the soul. — Aristotle.

You know, I'm not even sure how we ended up living together."
"I am," Jake said, turning back to the lake. "Sex. It's a powerful force, my boy, and women use it."
"Is that why you gave them up?" Will asked, sympathetically. "Did paranoia drive you to celibacy? — Jennifer Crusie

The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees - an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality. — Max Beckmann

Will had been taken aback in his confrontation with Arisaka to discover that his name- Chocho- meant "Butterfly" ... He was puzzled to know why they had selected it. His friends, of course, delighted in helping him guess the reason.
'I assume it's because you're such a snazzy dresser,' Evanlyn said. 'You Rangers are a riot of color, after all.' ...
'I think it might be more to do with the way he raced around the training ground, darting here and there to correct the way a man might be holding his shield, then dashing off to show someone how to put their body weight into their javelin cast,' said Horace, a little more sympathetically. Then he ruined the effect by adding thoughtlessly, 'I must say, your cloak did flutter around like a butterfly's wings. — John Flanagan

Amy doesn't love you."
George says it gently--like she's sympathetically sticking a piece of glass straight through my left eye. — Cath Crowley

She sighed and looked at him sympathetically. 'Cool flame tricks aside, there's no competition.'
He lifted his eyebrow. 'Library wins?'
'Every single time. — Elizabeth Hunter

Try to think of happy things," he says, caressing my forehead. I stare at the ceiling, tears welling. What happy things? Who could be happy in a world of podiums and microphones? "There are a billion people in China who don't give a rat's ass about your speech," Ken offers sympathetically. — Susan Cain

She spoke all the right words, Miss Boyce did. But the stiff set of her shoulders, and the fisting of her hands, suggested that apologizing felt about as pleasant as a sword through the stomach. 'Manners,' he said sympathetically. 'Very tedious. I suggest you shelve them. I don't miss them at all.'
'Yes, I can see how they proved inconvenient for you.' Her manner was so dry that it took a moment to recognize he was being mocked. He gave her an encouraging laugh. She had a great deal of potential, really. A little less starch and she would be as interesting has her dimple. — Meredith Duran

Then I give her a grim shake of my head and say aloud, 'This blows ass.' She nods sympathetically. She doesn't understand, but of course, in her way she understands completely. — Elizabeth Gilbert

She smiled sympathetically. She really was beautiful. And not just because she had a pretty face or anything. She believed in love so much, it was impossible not to feel giddy when she talked about it. — Rick Riordan

O love, fled me - or do telepathies cross sympathetically in the night? — Jack Kerouac

In addition, when a neighborhood's crime victims are portrayed as victims-sympathetically and without blame, as humans rather than as statistics-people living in other parts of the city are more inclined to support social services for the area, which in turn can reduce the crime rate. — Barry Glassner

Julian Street in his book, Abroad At Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures, painted a grim picture of Western Kansas as he traveled across the area in 1914. Street saw only a drab, treeless wasteland of brown and gray---"nothing, nothing, nothing"--images of incessant wind, violent cyclones, dust storms, and tragic desolation. As the train he was riding approached the small town of Monotony, which he felt was appropriately named, he listened sympathetically to the remarks of a fellow passenger: "God! How can they stand living out here? I'd rather be dead! — Daniel Fitzgerald

In war and policy one should always try to put oneself in the position of what Bismarck called "the Other Man". The more fully and sympathetically a Minister can do this the better are his chances of being right. The more knowledge he possesses of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do. But imagination without deep and full knowledge is a snare, — Winston S. Churchill

To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well known ... The "animal scientist" to whom it is of no concern whether or not animals suffer will almost inevitably aid and abet the destruction of the decent old ideal of animal husbandry and, as a consequence, increase the suffering of animals. I hope that my country may be delivered from the remote, cold abstractions of university science. — Wendell Berry

Maddie was about to follow when a girl beside her said, "Excuse me." Her hair was red, and her cheeks were dusted with light brown freckles. She had a mouth that seemed to want to smile, but for some reason her lips were tight. "I have been standing here for two entire minutes waiting for a seat." "Oh!" said Maddie. "I'm so sorry. I think there's been some kind of misunderstanding." She leaned closer and whispered helpfully, "The seats here don't come to you. You have to walk over to them." The girl's mouth gaped as if she was insulted. Maddie nodded sympathetically. "I agree," Maddie said. "I've often thought that chairs that come to you are a hexcellent idea. — Shannon Hale

You learn to get by from day to day," Sam Regan said sympathetically to him. "You never think in longer terms. Just until dinner or until time for bed; very finite intervals and tasks and pleasures. Escapes. — Philip K. Dick

Mallory asked sympathetically, reaching for the syrup, her engagement ring catching the light.
Amy shielded her eyes. "Jeez, Mallory, stop waving that thing around - you're going to blind us. Couldn't Ty have found one smaller than a third world country? Or less sparkyly? — Jill Shalvis

Festa di cazzo! Coglioni! Mostro!"
"A minute ago I was a hero." Sympathetically, he blew on the sting. "Better in a minute. Let's deal
with the rest."
"Va via."
"Would you mind cursing at me in English?"
"I said go away. Don't touch me."
"Come on, be a big, brave girl. I'll give you a lollipop after." He yanked the blanket aside, dealt
quickly, ruthlessly with the other scrapes. — Nora Roberts

Cricket could tell Enkai was holding back tears, and wishing to comfort him, she took his hand. They sat in silence for a long time, just holding hands, and when Cricket heard Enkai sniff, she knew he was crying.
"You should go. You shouldn't see me . . ."
"What?" said Cricket at once. "Be a person? Have feelings? Here . . ." She took a washcloth from the nightstand and dabbed his tears away. "I cried when I lost my friends. One of them died to get me here too."
"I'm sorry," Enkai said, blinking sympathetically as Cricket wiped his face.
Cricket smiled. "No, it's alright. I still see her sometimes." She dropped her eyes to the washcloth as she contently folded it and set it aside.
Enkai frowned. "You're weird, Cricket," he said with a laugh, and Cricket laughed as well. "But . . ." he added, "I guess that's why I like you. — Ash Gray

Even if matter could do every outward thing that God does, the idea of it would not work as satisfactorily, because the chief callfor a God on modern men's part is for a being who will inwardly recognize them and judge them sympathetically. Matter disappoints this craving of our ego, so God remains for most men the truer hypothesis, and indeed remains so for definite pragmatic reasons. — William James

I've always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch. — Gillian Flynn

I swallow. Will I like this different me? Will my friends and family? "I know there is a popular saying 'ignorance is bliss.'" She eyes me sympathetically, as if she knows my thoughts. "But I also know there is a better one that says 'knowledge is power.'" I'm currently unsure which one I agree with. — E.J. Mellow

Lopez patted his arm, closed her eyes with a pained grimace and said, "Then you gotta man the fuck up and go talk about your emotions." She opened her eyes at the muffled groan of protest from Jonah and said sympathetically, "I know, I feel your pain. You want to go shoot something? — Taylor Lewis

I'd give you some pants, but I don't wear any," a mage standing by a bookshelf remarked sympathetically. — Andrey Vasilyev

No, Daemon," Jaenelle said gently, looking up at him with her ancient, wistful, haunted eyes. "Everyone knows I'm different. It just doesn't matter to some - and it matters a lot to others." A tear slipped down her cheek. "Why am I different?" Daemon looked away. Oh, child. How could he explain that she was dreams made flesh? That for some of them, she made the blood in their veins sing? That she was a kind of magic the Blood hadn't seen in so very, very long? "What does the Priest say?" Jaenelle sniffed. "He says growing up is hard work." Daemon smiled sympathetically. "It is that. — Anne Bishop

Be wise. Treat yourself, your mind, sympathetically, with loving kindness. If you are gentle with yourself, you will become gentle with others. — Thubten Yeshe

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic. — Margaret Oliphant

Dinners are defined as 'the ultimate act of communion;' men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine. — Thomas Carlyle

The black middle class displays a torn ambivalence toward the situation of the black poor. They sympathetically recognize the harms of racism and targeted inequality while simultaneously pointing an accusatory finger at the individual faults of their poor friends, relatives, and neighbors. — Mary Pattillo

There she sits in the corner of the carriage - that carriage which is travelling, not from Richmond to Waterloo, but from one age of English literature to the next, for Mrs. Brown is eternal, Mrs. Brown is human nature, Mrs. Brown changes only on the surface, it is the novelists who get in and out - there she sits and not one of the Edwardian writers has so much as looked at her. They have looked very power- fully, searchingly, and sympathetically out of the window ; at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage ; but never at her, never at life, never at human nature. — Virginia Woolf

I produced a fulsome sermon. When the appointed Sunday arrived, I used all of my best grooming skills. I picked the cat hairs off my most expensive suit, smoothed my hair, and put a Band-aid on the thumb I had chewed while working overtime on my sermon. Once I met the delegation at church I did my best to dazzle them, and after the service was over we sat for almost two hours in a Sunday School room as I answered question after question about my history, my beliefs, my weaknesses, and my strengths. One man on the committee noticed the Band-aid on my thumb. "What did you do to yourself?" he asked sympathetically. "I cut it while I was cooking, "I lied. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Popularity
The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands. — H.L. Mencken

If God does not give you something you ask for, wait on Him. He will speak with you tenderly and sympathetically about the matter until you yourself understand that He cannot grant your prayer. — Ole Hallesby

It is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty. — Mahatma Gandhi

The world can understand well enough the process of perishing for want of food: perhaps few persons can enter into or follow out that of going mad from solitary confinement. They see the long-buried prisoner disinterred, a maniac or an idiot! - how his senses left him - how his nerves, first inflamed, underwent nameless agony, and then sunk to palsy - is a subject too intricate for examination, too abstract for popular comprehension ... And long, long may the minds to whom such themes are no mystery - by whom their beings are sympathetically seized - be few in number, and rare of reencounter. Long may it be generally thought that physical privations alone merit compassion, and that the rest is a figment. — Charlotte Bronte

If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called 'the spokesman of despair,' and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience. — Raymond Williams

We need a pretty substantial favor." She pointed at Crawford and herself. "He and I want to get married. Uh, Father Cyprian, this is John Crawford, and this is our daughter, Johanna." The priest nodded sympathetically. "One does tend to keep putting these things off, doesn't one? — Tim Powers

Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief. — Mark Twain

Steven Erikson is an extraordinary writer. I read Gardens of the Moon with great pleasure. And now that I have read it, I would be hard pressed to decide what I enjoyed more: the richly and ominously magical world of Malaz and Genabackis; the large cast of sympathetically-rendered characters; or the way the story accumulates to a climax that hits like machinegun fire. My advice to anyone who might listen to me is, Treat yourself to Gardens of the Moon. And my entirely selfish advice to Steven Erikson is, write faster. — Stephen R. Donaldson

Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason. — Louis Untermeyer

A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books appear almost accidentally, like a sudden surge in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are a part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy. — Robert M. Pirsig

He was all smug about how he'd negotiated flexible hours so he could continue being a hands-on dad, the dad his own father never got to be, and didn't he just lap up all the praise he got for being such an involved father, and laugh sympathetically, but enjoyably, over the fact that Clementine never got any praise for being an involved mother? — Liane Moriarty

You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility. — Robert Anton Wilson

To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-interest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations ... For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination. — Immanuel Kant

To understand sympathetically, with one's whole beings, the state of mind of some one radically unlike oneself is very difficult - is, so far as I am concerned, impossible. — Aldous Huxley

Exile must be a terrible thing, said Norton sympathetically.
"Actually," said Amalfitano, "now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate."
"But exile," said Pelletier, "is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that's important."
"That's just what I mean by abolishing fate," said Amalfitano. "But again, I beg your pardon. — Roberto Bolano

Are you the one named Alyse? For he calls that name in his sleep."
"No, that is his beloved sister, dead these past three years." The depth of my disappointment that it is not my name he calls takes me completely by surprise.
"Ah," the old nun says sympathetically, as if she somehow knows what I am feeling. "Then perhaps you are Sybella. That is the name he asks for when he is awake. — R.L. LaFevers

To live thoughtfully with Christlike love we must allow ourselves to be disturbed by the grotesque realities surrounding us and sympathetically enter into the nightmarish suffering of others. — Gregory A. Boyd

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses. — Elyn Saks