Quotes About Empathy

He knew how little praise it took for an insecure person to feel grateful.

When Fran had died and people had shared their own stories of grieving he'd wanted to hit them, to scream, I don't care if someone close to you died. Don't use my tragedy to wallow in your own. You cannot come close to knowing how I feel.

I don't hate you. I hate what you've done and what it led to.

Wesley didn't really like people who made demands on him,' Janey said. 'It was always the other way around. And depressed people can be very demanding.

It gave people the right to pity me. And in my opinion, there is nothing more degrading than pity.

she'd never had a best friend, no one with whom she could share her dreams. The nearest she had was Joe Ashworth.

Vera felt a twinge of sympathy. Perhaps the make-up and the sophisticated clothes were protection. Everyone had their own way of facing a hostile world.

Before she spoke again, he cut off her call because he didn't need her misery as well as his own

Writers were like parasites, preying on other people's stress and misery. Objective observers like spies or detectives.

That was why he hated Duncan. Not because he was a bully but because he'd forced Perez to see him as one. Because when he was fourteen, he'd been Perez's best friend.

She'd been an only child of two doting but not terribly emotionally intelligent parents. They were practical – if she asked for something, they gave it to her. But she couldn't ask for what she really needed. She didn't know how.

occurred to her as she passed the big house that she'd have nobody to comfort her in a tragedy. She thought it was probably simpler that way, and besides she'd never been able to cope with sympathy.

Kindness is very attractive when you're not used to it.

Having a child who is struggling doesn't make you a bad parent, just as being a child who is struggling doesn't make your child a bad kid.

Especially in the Western world, so much of our cultural ideas about grieving is about us, and I think it's important to get beyond that sometimes.

American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become.

As a child, I was subjected to a lot of spaghetti Westerns and hated them. I wanted the Indians to win - or just not be so sad!

My goal is to get power out of Westminster and into the hands of the people it affects. That means sharing power with those who have none and using national and local government to help people to help themselves and one another.

This crowd did not diminish through the whole of that cold, wet day; they seemed not to know what was to by their fate since their great benefactor was dead, and though strong and brave men wept when I met them.

The best you can sometimes do is learn to take a breath, count to ten and simply accept that try as you might, no, your husband will never, ever learn not to drop a wet towel on the bed. That acceptance too counts as resolving a fight.

Put someone on a horse looking cold and wet, and they don't have to act. They just are cold and wet.

We made connections between the monsters created by war and the monsters he created, the typical outcast that Whale was attracted to, and the monster in himself, that's inside all of us.

'Whale Talk' is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn't draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.

When I made 'Whale Rider' - of course, I'm not Maori and have no business, as a white girl, telling people how to be in this movie - I started by learning the language, as best I could.