Quotes About Empathy

Communicating with teenage girls is easy unless you're an adult, and then it's like having someone take a pair of pliers and, one-by-one, yank off your fingernails through your ears.

If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.

In my teenage years I had a very anti-cruelty orientation and all that kind of stuff, so having spent a long time at the track and around the horses and around the people that are there, I realized the saddest thing that can happen is if anything happens to a horse.

What we wanted to do was tell a story that felt relatable to anyone who's been a teenager. We haven't all been a second-generation Pakistani-American girl with superpowers, but we've all been 16 and awkward.

It wasn't a leap for me to go from not wanting to be in my body as a teenager, not wanting to be in my house, to thinking, 'What would happen if I had disappeared?' And then going from writing scenes of angry kids to thinking a little more about the parents and what their lives would be like.

Let me speak for myself: I think I wanted to see people who looked like me on TV. I wanted to see people who had similar experiences as I had, growing up. There was nobody on television when I was a teenager who I could relate to.

I feel like a teenager myself, so I appreciate it when the kids think you're all right.

I was called a 'CD' by a suicidal teenager, who is alive today because I became her 'Chosen Dad,' who loved her. We all have the potential to re-parent ourselves and others.

'The Catcher in the Rye.' When I was a teenager, that was my book; yes, somebody gets it, somebody gets adolescence.

You can never empathize with your parents as a teenager. You just think they're just on another planet.

I was a teenager and it was tough years for me. Being able to bring myself into a character and live in somebody else's world was so important for me emotionally. I couldn't express things well in my normal life. I was so overwhelmed by my emotions.

I couldn't quite get the hang of how to socialise as a teenager. I didn't really understand it.

Bullying has existed forever. Everyone has dealt with it, and teenagers, regardless of where they are, are dealing with the same stuff growing up.

I'm pretty normal. That's why I feel like I hope most teenagers can relate.

I think all teenagers feel alone, and that nobody else knows what they are going through and all that sort of stuff.

I understand and get when kids and teenagers feel like they're alone and it's not going to get better. My advice is that there is a support system out there, there are a lot of people who have been through what you're going through and are going through it now.

We've seen that there are a lot of people out there - teenagers in Topeka, housewives in Long Island, millionaire Internet start-up moguls - that all want to connect with each other about what it is to be human.

The majority of teenagers don't even make eye contact with people, even people of the same age.

I like writing for teenagers because they're not snobs.

I write with teenagers in mind.

I think the reason teenage fiction is so popular with adults is that adults hunger for narrative just as badly as teenagers do.

A lot of people think teenagers haven't gone through anything in their lives - they're not even 20 years old yet. But a twenty-something can go through the same type of experience or heartbreak that a 50-year-old can go through, so why does age matter?

There's so many things that I've gone through that I want to share because there's other teenagers that are going through the same things or will go through the same things.

I would be lying if I said if I didn't miss out on what normal teenagers do, of course. But I don't need pity for that.