She suggests that Lou Andreas-Salomé's intellect and gift for sympathetic understanding, combined with a gift for seduction, made her "the ideal muse," for a succession of men, including Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud.
In such disparate movies as "My Own Private Idaho," "To Die For" and the studio megahit "Good Will Hunting," Mr. Van Sant has displayed an uncommon gift, sympathetic yet unsentimental, for tapping the riches of young psyches.
Though Ms. Smith grows a bit long-winded in discussing these groups' millennial schemes, her gift for sympathetic characterization enables her to satirize her peoples' vanities and self-delusions without ever seeming patronizing or judgmental.
Mailer didn't have Roth's mimetic gifts, descriptive vision, or sympathetic humor, nor Bellow's commanding worldly wisdom.
In one frenetic chorus, they voice their earthly desires to this sympathetic stranger and ply him with gifts.
Ms. Tillyard's George III is a sad, sympathetic figure, a man of modest gifts who took his familial and royal duties very seriously.
It makes them all the more sympathetic, because we root for their gifts as well as their their spirits.
They forage through supermarket trash and eat the slightly bruised produce or just-expired canned goods that are routinely thrown out, and negotiate gifts of surplus food from sympathetic stores and restaurants.
When the head of MI5, the domestic intelligence agency, said those who published the material were handing a "gift to terrorists," several papers ran sympathetic editorials.
Instead, I become this sympathetic character who apparently isn't worthy of the gift of Christ.
My bride was sympathetic to my plight, collecting tissues and making trips to the gift shop for cold medicine, but I think that's only because, in 1993, iPhones and mobile apps were a mere glint in Steve Jobs' eye.
