Quotes About Empathy

Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse, the source of all that bedevils us. It is the source of homophobia, xenophobia, racism, sexism, terrorism, bigotry of every variety and hue, because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its timpani is saying.

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers.

In the aftermath of death Small talk feels too small, big talk too enormous.

This is how I learn most of what I know about my children and their friends: by sitting in the driver's seat and keeping quiet.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew.

A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.

Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychological one.

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind, the second is to be kind, and the third is to be kind.

Perhaps only when we've made our peace with our own selves can we really be the kind of friends who listen, advise, but don't judge, or not too harshly.

What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn't supposed to touch the bone.

The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed.

Then one day we suddenly realized that we had been keeping him alive not because it was good for him, but because it was good for us, because it was too hard to make the decision to let him go. And in the joyful bargain between dog and person, that is the one unforgivable cheat.

It was easy to figure out how people ought to behave out in the world if you never went out in the world yourself.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work. Each time I look at my diploma, I remember that I am still a student, still learning every day how to be human.

It's so easy to be wrong about the things you're close to. I know that now. I learned that then.

It was a kind of circular thing: to be the kind of person who would have taken Faith in, he had to be the kind of person who would take her back.

All of reading is really only finding ways to name ourselves, and, perhaps, to name the others around us so that they will no longer seem like strangers. Crusoe and Friday. Ishmael and Ahab. Daisy and Gatsby. Pip and Estella. Me. Me. Me. I am not alone. I am surrounded by words that tell me who I am, why I feel what I feel.

Count your blessings, my father always said. It shames you, to count yours by the hardships of other people.

He was quiet and thoughtful, letting her do all the talking until she would reach one of her acerbic pitches and he would murmur, You don't really mean that. But he had never seemed put off.

The girl was huddled against the door on her side now, all folded in upon herself like an old woman, or like a child who'd fallen asleep on a long journey; she heard the sounds of him as if they were musical notes, each distinct and clear, and her shoulders moved slightly beneath her shirt, and her hands were jammed between her knees.

Our ability to understand, to embrace, to help, to know, to feel and to love is bounded only by our own emotional ambitions. The capacity to open ourselves up to one another is as huge as we dare to make it.

Perhaps we women are more willing to break the ice. Two things that made this possible most often in many of our lives were intimate friendship and reading.

If you want help, you shouldn't act like a person who never needs any," my daughter muttered to me one night when I was angry, and for once I was at a loss for words because she had so completely nailed my modus operandi.