Quotes About Empathy

That just goes to show that you never can tell about a person by guessing," Frances informs her niece. "That's why language was invented. Otherwise, we'd all be like dogs, sniffing each other to find out where we stood.

You think terrible things can't happen because they've never happened to you, but they're out there, all the time, every day. They happen to someone.

There are sick people everywhere, in wheelchairs and on benches. Shelby is embarrassed to be so healthy.

I wondered if damaged people ever got over what damaged them.

Elv felt consoled. She'd done such terrible things no one could forgive her, except perhaps for another sorrowful creature who understood the effects of human cruelty, who could lie down beside her and know she hadn't meant any harm.

She had the ability to know what people were thinking, and therefore understood that boys who were rude were usually fearful and that quiet girls often had a lot to say.

I thought perhaps it was more important to listen than to be heard.

Somehow, I knew how alone he felt, and it gave me shivers to think that alienation could be a shared experience.

To hell with human beings. I'd always felt safer with stories than with flesh and blood.

Was it possible to know anyone, truly?

Lion had to kiss her then and there, even though when he kissed her he felt as though he were swallowing her sadness.

I knew I was supposed to have sympathy for the main character, the orphaned Jane, who was near my age and all but friendless and whose name I took for myself on the nights I wandered off on my own. Yet it was the madwoman locked in the attic who held my interest and compassion.

She didn't thank Ben, and she probably should have, but maybe he knows that she's grateful. Maybe he understands that saying thank you can be just as hard as saying good-bye.

She doesn't know why she didn't turn out like the girl in Union Square, screaming at passersby, caught in the web of her own pain, but on nights when she's reading her veterinary journals, and the dogs are sleeping, she wonders if it's possible that when she rescued them, they rescued her as well.

Jet's hair was so tangled a brush would no longer go through it. She didn't bathe and ate only crackers and ginger ale. She slept with the edition of Emily Dickinson that Levi had given her. Inside he had written Forever—is composed of—Nows.

It was then that Nathaniel truly began to appreciate the years he had spent alone in his room, the distance from other people that had given him the ability to observe and to feel what another might had also made him a writer.

No one can accept the indiscriminate order of cruelty.

That was how you knew love. My mother had told me that. All you had to do as imagine your life without the other person, and if the thought alone made you shiver, then you knew.

I think that people can surprise you in so many ways, both with cruelty and with kindness.

Buddy had spent a great deal of time at the children's ward at the hospital over on the Turnpike. Every Saturday, during Ben's magic act, he was pulled out of a hat that was old and smelled of alfalfa and sweat. Buddy was used to bright lights and people crying, and he was always well behaved. He had never once bitten a child, not even when he'd been poked or teased. Now, he rose onto his back legs and balanced carefully, just as he'd been taught.

It's true, tragedy can bring you closer or drive you apart.

Mrs. Farrell told me that no man was a monster, not even Heathcliff, and that most people's misdeeds were rooted in the treatment they'd received in the world.

he couldn't remember how it felt to live his life without his dog.

It was easier not to face judgment, especially from your own kind.