Quotes About Empathy

For three nights he hadn't known how to touch my mother or what to say. Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow the stronger one's strength. And they had never understood, as they did now, what the word horror meant. ~pgs 20-21

our heartache poured into one another like water from cup to cup.

She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.

If you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.

In moments like this she thought of all the little girls who grew into adulthood and old age as a sort of cipher alphabet for all those who didn't. Their lives would somehow be inextricably attached to all the girls who had been killed.

For me the saddest thing was that these animals smelled the brokenness in him – the human defect – and kept away.

It was in these moments, I knew, that my father loved my mother most. When my mother was broken and helpless, when her hard shell was stripped away and her spite and brittleness couldn't serve her. It was a sad dance of two people who were starving to death in each other's arms. Their marriage an X that forever joined murderer to victim.

I guess I'm too selfish to travel well with other people, I told Anne later.

Oh, Celie, unbelief is a terrible thing. And so is the hurt we cause others unknowingly.

Who am I to tell her who to love? My job just to love her good and true myself. P. 237

When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.

Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored

And I thank God let me gain understanding enough to know love can't be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan. P.238

A writer's heart, a poet's heart, an artist's heart, a musician's heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world...

We do not believe in heaven or hell...; we do not believe in eternal damnation. We believe only in the unavoidable horror of hurting others and of likewise being hurt.

Is solace anywhere more comforting than in the arms of a sister?

Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights.

Resist the temptation to think what afflicts you is peculiar to you. Have faith that what is in your consciousness can be communicated to the consciousness of all. And is, in many cases, already there.

I wish I could be traveling with her, but thank God she able to do it. Sometimes I feel mad at her. Feel like I could scratch her hair right off her head. But then I think, Shug got a right to live too. She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don't take away none of her rights.

If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Helped are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. -----"The Gospel According to Shug

Too much respect for people who are not respectful to you is a sure sign of insecurity.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.