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Quote by Renée Knight

“If anyone was capable of understanding how someone else felt, it was Nancy. There weren't as many layers between her and the world as there were with the rest of us. She had that rare ability of being able to stand in someone else's shoes and get inside their skin.”

Quote by Renée Knight

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Renée Knight

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“He can’t tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal’s mind or whether he’s in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of pre-verbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can’t anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you’ve lost something important in a dream and you can’t even remember what it was but it’s important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn’t have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.”

“Good conversation comes form just such flexibility. As observations come up, it meanders, following a course that tends in a particular direction, but moves responsively in new directions as associations are triggered, words are paused over to consider their implications, examples are invented, connections are made. Like jazz, it is a work of improvisation that entails listening intently for what the others are doing and moving with them. The curiosity which sustains that intensity pauses at every turn to notice what's happening, to raise new questions and pursue them. In a gentle pursuit of ideas, it makes room for the unexpected. Exercised in this way, curiosity becomes an avenue of grace. Conversation pursued in this spirit is full of surprise. It connects one idea or thought or analogy with another in ways that could not have been predicted.”

“A legend of the desert tells the story of a man who wanted to move to another oasis, and began to load up his camel. He piled on his rugs, his cooking utensils, his trunks of clothes -and the animal accepted it all. As they were leaving, the man remembered a beautiful blue feather his father had given him. He retrieved it and placed it on the camel's back. With that, the animal collapsed of the weight and died. “My camel couldn't even bear the weight of a feather,” the man must have thought. Sometimes we think the same of others -without understanding that our little joke may have been the drop that caused the goblet of suffering to overflow.”