Quotes About Empathy

On the Decker bus she often gave up her seat to older passengers or to women with young children, she was nervously alert to the needs or near-needs of other people. It pleased and excited her to see the space she'd occupied taken, the emptiness where she had been so readily filled in.

You have hardened your heart against your "American cousin." It was courageous in the memoir to state so clearly how you had to harden your heart against so much, to survive. Americans believe that suffering makes saints of us, which is a joke. Still I realize you have no time for me in your life now. There is no "purpose" to me. Even

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul." —

It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It is very hard to prevail in any case but without this love, it is close to impossible.

if she petted or fed one animal in the presence of others, she must pet and feed them all. It was what Jesus would have done had He lived intimately with animals.

Because nothing between human beings isn't uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

stroke recently. A friend at least a decade

A dog's life is a speeded-up version of your own. After a while, you can hardly bear to be a witness.

Sleeping with another person is a responsibility, a trust: you must not intrude into the other's dreaming.

When a man shares with a woman his marital/domestic problems, the kind of problems that seem never to be solved but only to morph into yet more complicated problems, like hair snarls proliferating, sympathy flows in one direction only. By instinct a woman knows it's naive to expect the flow to reverse.

Corset,' Mrs. Erskine? I don't understand." Because she was trussed up in one herself, she couldn't comprehend how Ariah had escaped hers.

She was murmuring, "It's all right, dear, it will be all right, I love you." For that was the one thing she knew, amid all that she didn't.

Mom was furious at the way people abandoned their pets in the country—"As if animals aren't human, too.

It was a principle of hers that you must never say anything about another person you would not say in that person's presence.

You can be on easy terms with such a man, you can see that he likes you, then by mistake you say the wrong word or make the wrong assumption and something shuts down in his face. Like an iron grating over a pawnshop window on a rundown street in Atlantic City. That abrupt.

papà ci amava. Ci ama. Diceva che, se non ci avesse voluto bene, non ci avrebbe punite. Riesco a capirlo, davvero. Però è un modo di pensare malato, e sbagliato".

Marianne was not the type to speak of such things, she'd worry she was betraying the boy's confidence, but if the boy was pursuing her, so much more doggedly than other boys had pursued her. Marianne would be terribly distressed. Nothing worried her more than the possibility she'd hurt someone's feelings.

Why is the misery of a child so hilarious to other children?

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily,often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul-- Joyce Carole Oates

To forgive is wisdom, to forget is genius.

What saved us from becoming hard-nosed or callous was that we really liked each other, while remaining totally mystified by each other.

She felt everything too deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.

She felt everything so deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.

Is there any real purpose in being alive if all we are going to do is get up every day and live only for ourselves? Live your life to help others. Give & live selflessly.