Quotes About Empathy

I'm sorry. But it's like you said, Emma...I don't have any claws.

I write to give myself a strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn't your real husband, he was a bad dream - an alien of sorts - who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in.

Don't forget: hold somebody's hand through the dark.

When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else. —Joy Harjo

I was a star falling from the night sky I needed you to catch me I was a rainbow lifting from a dark cloud I needed you to see me You keep your eyes to the ground

The question that comes up when you write about trauma is, are you retraumatizing? Are you retraumatizing by writing about trauma? That's a good question. I remember the writer, poet Meridel Le Sueur, social activist in the '30, calling to tell me when I was a young woman, she said: "I wrote so beautifully about terrible things that happened. And was I wrong to do that?

I study and read poems and try to put myself in them.

The door to the mind should only open from the heart. An enemy who gets in, risks the danger of becoming a friend.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception of her, and love of her.

her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own to minimize conflict.

As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.

HUSBAND: Is something wrong? BETHIE: Why--why do you ask? HUSBAND: You looked so lonely, suddenly. As if you'd forgotten I'm here.

There are people, primarily women!--who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They need not be beautiful women or girls. It's a matter of blood warmth. The integrity of the spirit. He turned the page of his sketch pad and began anew, whistling thinly through his teeth. Thus an icy-cold soul, in the presence of one so blessed, can regain something of his lost self. Sometimes!

If she lets us down, if she's weird sometimes—just ignore it, and love her. Just love her.

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

There's something about other people isn't there?--you'd like to know who they are?--you'd like to be them, maybe? People you never saw before and--my voice lifting in excitement, it's so strange how they're different from you, isn't it?--or like if somebody had the power, say somebody said to you, 'would you change places with the next person you see, a stranger just turning a corner,' I'd say, 'Hell yes.

The things that link us deepest, we can't feel. Except if they're taken from us.

Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.

Without anyone to talk to, a person is not quite real. Sounds are very important - we are like bats tapping at each other with sounds, making sure there is someone there, groping along. Sounds. Syllables. The beat of music. It is all a curious flowing, which you can hear only when you are silent yourself.

Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised.

Not hearing impaired but just not hearing which is a way of not caring.)