“I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots but because I would have been probing my own. This is called tact, and is reputed to be a virtue.”

Source: Rite of Passage (1968), Chapter 7 (p. 97).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I hadn’t gone into the subject of dorm living too deeply with him, not because I hesitated to probe his tender spots bu…" by Alexei Panshin?

Alexei Panshin13

American writer and critic 1940

Related quotes

“Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I'd been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

“For me any of the little gestures I make are all tentative probes. That's why I feel free to make them sound as outrageous or extreme as possible. Until you make it extreme, the probe is not very efficient.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Marshall McLuhan: the man and his message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, 1989, p. 32
1980s and later

“No matter how much I probe and prod,
I cannot quite believe in God”

Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist

"Agnostic".
Rhymes for the Irreverent (1965)
Context: No matter how much I probe and prod,
I cannot quite believe in God;
But oh, I hope to God that He
Unswervingly believes in me.

“She was too alert, too alive not to have the kind of mind that probed and reached and got her into trouble now and then.”

Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 1 (p. 18)

“The artist's main business is to train his eye to see, then to probe and then to train his hand to work in sympathy with his eye. I have a habit of looking, and really seeing.”

John Nash (artist)

Cited in: Dr Ronald Blythe (2013) The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-1958. Chapter 5.

“My power of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is not emptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5
Context: In our reflection we must go back to where we stand in awe before sheer being, faced with the marvel of the moment. The world is not just here. It shocks us into amazement.
Of being itself all we can positively say is: being is ineffable. The heart of being confronts me as enigmatic, incompatible with my categories, sheer mystery. My power of probing is easily exhausted, my words fade, but what I sense is not emptiness but inexhaustible abundance, ineffable abundance. What I face I cannot utter or phrase in language. But the richness of my facing the abundance of being endows me with marvelous reward: a sense of the ineffable.