Quotes About Compassion

A life can be blessed without your ever deserving it. You can be loved by people just because they choose to love you.

Stories provide a rare chance to temporarily suspend being in your own body, in your own life, and to slip into the very existence of another person.

Forgiveness given is forgiveness gained.

One thing that discovering my own history had taught me is that we must learn not to whip ourselves for the failures of others. When a mother cannot love and protect her children, it is not the children who are defective.

They hunt for food in Dumpsters. . . . Hunt for food . . . I passed the apartment complex with the crumbling white stucco walls, looked over, watched the Dumpster go by, but the vision stayed with me. I pictured the children climbing among the broken bottles and Wal-Mart sacks full of soiled diapers. They weren't playing. . . . The image was clear now—the little girl holding a wad of foil, the boy turning over a Hostess Cup Cakes box. . . .

When I was little, I'd attended a neighborhood potluck there with Poppy and Aunt Ruth. There were tables full of casseroles, salads, and desserts. Was it possible that, now, just down the road, children were looking for food in trash cans?

I've finally come to fully understand that you can't fix another person. You can't fix the past. You can only change your way of reacting to it. You have to wait for other people to fix themselves.

There are no bad men. Just the lost looking to be found, sister.

I have learned that most people get along as best they can. They don't intend to hurt anyone. It is merely a terrible by-product of surviving.

Blessings aren't fully realized until they are passed along.

It's hard to believe that, not so many years ago, orphaned children were little more than chatte

Tightening my fingers, I held on. "Honey, the farther you go in life, the more you realize that most people aren't trying to hurt anybody. They're just trying to . . . get by. People don't always make the right decisions—even the people we love. I know Jake loves us. He's just trying to . . . find his way right now.

Stories are a little like mind places. You can do whatever you want with them. I want my stories to have happy endings, where nobody hurts anybody. There's enough hard stuff in the real world.

It's funny how when you think you've got problems, you usually don't have to look far to find someone who's in a lot worse shape.

I'm indebted to all of you who read these stories and also to the booksellers who sell them with such devotion. As Mr. Rogers once said, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.

Ever'body got a reason for what they do. You eat off somebody else's plate, drink a their cup, could be, you'd be that same way.

The music of old age is difficult to hear when it's playing for someone you love.

In my multifold years of life, I have learned that most people get along as best they can. They don't intend to hurt anyone. It is merely a terrible by-product of surviving

She changed the general perception that orphans were damaged goods.

Hardship finds its way into every life. It's just much easier to see our own than other people's.

In a few years, she would realize that there was nothing she could do to change the world around her, to repair the people she needed most. The missing pieces were out of reach of her tiny hands, the broken places not hers to mend. In my adult mind I understood that, but deep inside me there would always be the girl who wondered if she could have fixed things.

How can God allow such abominations to flourish unchecked in this world? The answer came in a question, Ruby. God, in reply, asked, "How can you?

Sometimes it ain't the drunk or the sinner who needs a shovel across the rear, it's the ones who could quote you chapter and verse about grace, but don't hand it out.

Where there is injustice, one must stand against it. Where there is suffering, one must be the hands and feet of our Lord. Where there is opportunity for good, one must seize it. As go our words, so must our acts.