Quotes About Empathy

she turned to the first page, feeling vaguely prurient, like an eavesdropper or a peeping tom. Novelists spend a lot of time poking their noses into other people's business. Ruth was not unfamiliar with this feeling.

In Zen we have a story. If your left hand gets a painful splinter, what does your right hand do? Does your right hand say, "Oh, that's too bad, but it's not my problem"? No, of course not. The right hand pulls the splinter out. This is interconnectedness.

There's nothing sadder than cyberspace . . . but I've already said this.

I don't hate anybody.

That's what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we're able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely.

Kannon, with her thousand arms and eleven heads, who could hear the voices of things crying out. I said I could totally relate to that, and when she told us that Kannon was the Buddhist saint of compassion

The first words of a book are of utmost importance. The moment of encounter, when a reader turns to that first page and reads those opening words, it's like locking eyes or touching someone's hand for the first time, and we feel it, too. Books don't have eyes or hands, it's true, but when a book and a reader are meant for each other, both of them know it

Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces again and again.

He sat perfectly still, studying his hands in his lap. "I know it is a stupid idea to design a weapon that will refuse to kill," he said. "But maybe I could make the killing not so much fun.

So thank you for noticing, and thank you, too, for what you said just now: I knew you were mine. These are words every book wants to hear, and they sent a tremor of delight down our spine.

I thought I understood everything about cruelty, but it turns out, I didn't understand anything at all.

Sometimes you don't need words to say what's in your heart.

Assumptions suck. They're like expectations. Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship

So of course I feel angry, I said, angrily. What do you expect? It was a stupid thing to ask. Yes, she agreed. It was a stupid thing to ask. I see that you're angry. I don't need to ask such a stupid thing to understand that. So why did you ask? Slowly she turned herself around, pivoting on her knees, until finally she was facing me. I asked for you, she said. For me? So you could hear the answer.

I don't know any prayers, so I just make them go round and round and say blessings in my head for all the things and people I love, and when I run out of things I love, I move on to the things I don't hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate.

Do all kids have to worry about their parents' mental health?

what's the point in beating yourself up when other people will do it for you?

Listen! 'To Benny, who hears the cries of the world.' Isn't that beautiful? And it's so true, don't you think?

Experience soon taught me never to write about anything important to me - the M?oris, animals, the unemployed men, the empty boarded-up houses that frightened me. The subsequent trampling of my sensibilities would have destroyed me. Soon everything I wrote came only from my imagination.

I'd rather be a fool than hard-hearted.

I wonder if any of us ever really knows another person?" she replied, sounding wistful.

What I was learning, on those weekend walks, is how much you can find out about a person merely by watching what he eats. Food became my own private way of looking at the world.

Don't hate anyone," she had said. "It's quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated." So

But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can't help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn't a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in this world there are people who, if they sat next to a homeless fellow they'd get the urge to snuggle up to him, but if they sat next to a baby they'd get an urge to kill it?