Speaking Volumes Quotes

“Imaginative intelligence, the power to put ourselves sympathetically in another person's place, is one of the highest forms of intelligence and one of the rarest. Its importance is seldom understood. It is often equated in the popular mind with "romantic" or silly fantasies, feminine oversensitivity, silly vaporizing, ego-indulgence, or escapism, and is thought to have only an enfeebling connection, if any, with practical living. Nothing could be further from the truth. We can be taught to argue, to debate, to analyze, to calculate, to learn the processes of engineering, the pathology of disease, to understand the laws of nature or the laws of the land but who can teach us how to understand and to respect another person's feelings (pg. 147).”
― Edith Newman Devlin, Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood

“Men were expected to have opinions rather than to listen which often makes them deaf to what they should her (pg. 238).”
― Edith Newman Devlin, Speaking Volumes: A Dublin Childhood