Quotes About Empathy

Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.

Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds.

Frederick can walk for hours in the woods, can identify warblers fifty yards away simply by hearing their song. Frederick hardly every thinks of himself. Frederick is stronger than he is in every imaginable way.

Thank in your heart the brave soul who carries this letter away from me and on its way to you.

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.

She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.

Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.

we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

but it was also something in Sandy herself, an unwillingness to allow anything more to upset the realm of her understanding.

a bondade, mais do que qualquer outra coisa, é o que perdura.

What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair. "Poor child.

On est très loin de comprendre ce que c'est d'être aveugle, quand on ferme les yeux.

Los sordos pueden oír los latidos de su propio corazón, frau Elena?

Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.

If we don't talk to the thing we are afraid of, it becomes the thing we hope to kill.

It's not your fault, he said. And I'm not defending her for what she did. But I believe any story that anybody tells me. You can't be to blame if you got faith in people.

but one of the dying's imperatives is to make the living see them. This is nobody's fault, but it is everybody's burden.

Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

What it says is that when going against your teenage child's wishes, the greatest wisdom is to say what you have to say, do what you have to do, and then stop—because they will not. An overwhelmingly valuable skill in the parenting of today's teenagers is learning to disengage—sooner rather than later.

Worse yet, adolescents will be sensitive to hurt puppies, to starving children in distant countries, to a friend with a problem. But not to us, their parents. They do take us totally for granted.

What is it to be the parent of a teenager? It is to do what you think best—when really you have no idea what is best. It is to ride out the storms and be back again the next day. It is to give love to a child who does not seem to want it, to a child who five minutes ago seemed to deserve a punch more than anything else.

success is not about wealth or fame, it's about making a difference in other people's lives every single day of our lives