“If at least I had solved my problems! Oh, I had not settled one of them, and how many they were! But I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.”
“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour.”
“A major part of keeping love alive is recognizing moments of connection and holding them up where you both can see them (...). They remind us of how precious our relationship is and what close connection feels like. They remind us of the simple ways we can transform our partner’s world with the power of our caring.”
“Everybody say she was real nice and cooked good. […] She liked takin’ care of people […] I mean, people always say she was really just hospitality, you know, fixin everything up nice, make a good place, get up, cook breakfast for everybody, even if it’s twenty of them.”
“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things - beautiful things - that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
“Do any of us children, she wondered, ever stop to ask ourselves where our teachers go when school is over for the day? Do we wonder if they live alone, or if there is a mother at home or a sister or a husband?”
“I am tired of caring,” I say. “Why should I?”
“Because they could kill you!”
“They better,” I say to her. “Because anything less than that isn’t going to work.”
“You’ve seen him caring for those people -- the ones so low that no one, not I or anyone else, cared what happened to them. When I see that, I know that the God of Israel has not forgotten us.”
“Ani thought perhaps it was that she cared too much. She was constantly worried about what others thought of her, and how every word she spoke could condemn her further. Ani thought how to explain that to Selia and decided that she could not. Selia’s ease with strangers and friends alike made Ani sure she would not understand.”
“The same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
“Love is something else entirely. It is caring. It is arguing with curiosity—It is giving an inch when the other seems certainly wrong—it is teasing, it is empathy, it is respect, it is a moment of quiet smiling admiration each morning.”
“For sometimes a choice must be made—this is the definition of focus. Sacrifice is not a word: it is loss and achievement, and most of all it is caring about other more than self.”
“Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem. The fact that the meaning of race may evolve over time or lose much of its significance is hardly a reason to be struck blind. ”
“That night I gave another bad reading. I didn’t care. They didn’t care. If John Cage could get one thousand dollars for eating an apple, I’d accept $500 plus air fare for being a lemon.”
“Sometimes...you can cry until there’s nothing wet in you. You can scream and curse to where your throat rebels and ruptures. You can pray, all you want, to whatever god you think will listen. And, still it makes no difference. It goes on, with no sign as to when it might release you. And you know that if it ever did relent...it would not be because it cared.”
“What happened was: they became a team, a family of two. There had been times before they ran away when they had acted like a team, but those were very different from feeling like a team. […] You might call it caring. You could even call it love. And it is very rarely, indeed, that it happens to two people at the same time—especially a brother and a sister who had always spent more time with activities than they had with each other. ”
“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only—if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
“Kingshaw was used to lacking any confidence in himself, to knowing that he could do nothing very well. Until now, he had not much cared how he’d got by. Now, he cared, his pride had risen, he could no longer be docile about himself. Everything was unfair.
“But even so she longed for her mother to say, yes, she would be able to have her next riding lesson, more than she longed for anything in the world, because that would be a promise that she would be better very quickly and wouldn’t any longer feel so queer and unreal and not be able to care about anything.”