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Tenderness is the most modest form of love.

Olga Tokarczuk

In her 2019 Nobel lecture “The Tender Narrator,” Polish author Olga Tokarczuk reflected on her belief that tenderness is an understated but vitally important form of love. “Tenderness,” she said, “appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our ‘self.’” Feeling tenderness toward another being, then, is an intrinsic emotion that goes beyond empathy. Tokarczuk called it a “deep emotional concern” that acknowledges the similarities in our shared and fragile existence and honors the bonds between all living things. We are each part of the whole, she suggested, and tenderness is a way of looking at the world as “alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.”

Very interesting, Angie. I didn't know that Olga Tokarczuk was a Nobel Prize winner. Her view of tenderness is sensitive and interesting. I've read her novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which is in a class of its own. It's weird, thoughtful, angry and dark in its humor.

Mona, just saw your post. I am not familiar with her book. Isabel Allende I guess you could say took literary license with her translations! LOL

True friendship withstands time, distance, and silence.

Isabel Allende

Chilean author Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read Spanish-language authors in the world, with a style that combines magical realism, personal experience, and historic events. She began her writing career translating Barbara Cartland novels into Spanish, while surreptitiously adding a few changes to make the female characters more intelligent (a practice that later got her fired). She was a TV personality for a while, wrote for a feminist magazine, worked for the United Nations, and fled Chile to Venezuela following dictator Augusto Pinochet’s coup. She later moved to California, where she still lives and writes today. To say that she was well received in the U.S. would be an understatement: In 2014, Allende was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.

More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.

Charlie Chaplin

When Charlie Chaplin wrote the script for his 1940 film “The Great Dictator,” he was making a bold choice. At a time when Adolf Hitler was in full power, the beloved filmmaker and comedian used satire to stand up for humanity and freedom. Chaplin included this line in the famous speech given at the end of the film. It’s an appeal to prize unity over hate in order to overthrow oppressors and live freely. The sentiment remains significant today: In a world that prizes power and success, it reminds us to value peace, kindness, and empathy.