Quotes About Compassion

when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet—and this is curious—the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another.

Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?

moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to

She doesn't want his sympathy. She hates pity.

To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he'd ever thought it would.

Perhaps we're all doomed to fail as mothers, but if so, it's better to err on the side of showing too much love, not too little.

Some of us walk about with the burden of old wounds. What must it be like to have the burden of…healing?

Your happiness, quite simply, is my happiness. Cynthia slowly closed her eyes against the look in his. Cannot bear.

Be kind to the spider. It's simply working hard to be itself. And don't tell the maids

Gentleness was sometimes perilously close to pity.

Something was stirring in him, though; a bud of comprehension that could very well bloom into forgiveness if left unchecked.

She suspected she looked upon greatness for the first time in the form of a dusty, weary, rueful vicar, who did things like hold the hand of an old woman as she breathed her last breath and throw his fist into the jaw of a man who slurred her questionable honor and came in the dead of night to sit by the bed of her maid.

Sometimes being heroic means showing uncommon grace in the face of untenable circumstances.

Why are people so cruel? What did I ever do to them?

I wish I could tell my parents, If you want to help me, help me die.

It's a sin to hate, and for that reason alone, we must not hate the Normans... We can, however, thoroughly dislike them, Alice.

Hate the sin, not the sinner.

I followed their gaze to a plug of a woman, her head of salt-and-pepper hair shorn into the sort of crew cut they give to the mentally disabled, who had plopped down on the concrete irectly behind me.

The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy—the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

Any person who is carrying a lot of sadness needs to be able to rest sometimes, and to put it down.

As for religious faith, a lack of it shouldn't stop us from doing good deeds for their own sake.

But then, if you forget what's bad, cruel, unjust, you might not care anymore about setting things to rights. You might stop standing up against the folk who do evil deeds. And someone's got to.

There were those whose love spilled over into their every gesture, and so was shared by all who knew them. But they were rare folk indeed.

My heart. Your heart.