Quotes About Empathy

The magic of influence is less in what we say and more in how we say it and who we are.

It suddenly struck me that Dawsey is a lonesome person. I think it may be that he has always been lonely, but he didn't mind before, and now he minds.

The wonderful thing about books--and the thing that made them such a refuge for the islanders during the Occupation--is that they take us out of our time and place and understanding, and transport us not just into the world of the story, but into the world of our fellow readers, who have stories of their own.

The writer has to die to give birth to the intellectual in the service of the wretched of the earth.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.

Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.

Cruelty is a mystery, and a waste of pain.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

Deryn put her own arms around herself, but it didn't feel the same. Barking spiders, she muttered softly

Sometimes I think I'm nothing but what other people have done to me

Because that's what people need after traumas, apparently - lots of long conversations about the effects of trauma.

It perplexes me how many people write books where everyone comes from the same basic set of backgrounds—middle class, white, straight, etc. It's like writing a book set in a world without coincidences, accidents, and colors. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? It reduces drama and conflicts and narrows the possible variety of points of view. And really, the whole magic of books is to show us the world through someone else's eyes. Experiencing the Other is what novels are for.

Maybe human beings are programmed … to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad, Tally. Besides, we had a whole city of pretties to choose from, and we chose each other.

It helps to be with people who remember you, and who still think about you.

she'd felt from David was crushed by it. Every day of her life she'd insulted other uglies and had been insulted in return. Fattie, Pig-Eyes, Boney, Zits, Freak—all the names uglies called one another, eagerly and without reserve. But equally, without exception, so that no one felt shut out by some irrelevant mischance of birth.

Maybe he really could see past her ugly face. Maybe what was inside her did matter to him more than anything else. Tally

The stitches in my forehead itched, loud noises made me jump, and I'd been wearing the same socks for three days in a row. Everyone

They talk with their hands, a gesture for every syllable, conductors guiding their conversation like an orchestra.

The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work

The motivation of love motivates us to give our lives for others. In sum, Rutilio Grande embodied all three of these, and "died loving others," pardoning his enemies. "Who knows if the murderers that have now fallen into excommunication are listening to a radio in their hideout, listening, in their conscience to this word. We want to tell you, murderous brothers, that we love you and that we ask of God repentance for your hearts, because the church is not able to hate.

How can we heal our world without first caring for our children, without giving them a starting chance? We aren't taught how to deal with our feelings, how to recognize the issues that have the potential to assassinate our real chances at relationships; instead, we all make do with what tools we have. We all learn clever ways to divert the issues, to project our emotional pains onto others, often labeling these as their faults.

euthanizer of compassion

What can books do that movies can't? Put the vision in the hands of the reader. With a book, you've got a writer and a director—and the director is the reader.