Quotes About Empathy

The dying had the gift of ruthlessness. He knew that by hard experience. And there was something in her expression as she looked up at him that stopped his voice completely.

It must be awkward wearing one's whole interior life on display, for anyone to read.

There's nothing like being annoyed by different sentiences to make you really appreciate your own.

There is incredible value in being of service to others. I think if most of the people in therapy offices were dragged out to put their finger in a dike, take up their place in a working line, they would be relieved of terrible burdens.

books are like confort food without the calories

I have wanted you to see out of my eyes so many times.

How had I come to be herelike them, and overheara cry of pain that could havegot loud and worse but hadn't?

Close, close all night the lovers keep. They turn together in their sleep, Close as two pages in a book that read each other in the dark. Each knows all the other knows, learned by heart from head to toes.

If after I read a poem the world looks like that poem for 24 hours or so I'm sure it's a good one—and the same goes for paintings.

One shouldn't get too involved with people who can't possibly understand one

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, the daily seeing or touching, begins to become love, and to lay one open to pain.

You and I are enough to break anyone's heart—how can we not break our own?

It's not just that we are incurious; we completely lack any sense of each other's existences.

I am much too influenced by people's manner towards me—especially Anna's I suppose. Directly people attack me, I think they are right, and hate myself, and then I hate them—the more I like them this is so.

Sacrificers," said Matchett, "are not the ones to pity. The ones to pity are those that they sacrifice

If they should only be ill,' she said, 'there would be so many little things we could do for them. It does seem in a kind of a way an opportunity. I often think it is only when a man is ill that he understands what a woman means in his life.

But a man must live. Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people's lives—or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours. Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

But here I do see how everyone feels." "I wonder if I like that," said Eddie. "I suspect how people feel, and that seems to me bad enough—I wonder if the truth would be worse or better. The truth, of course I mean, about other people. I know only too well how I feel.

he felt her knocking through him like another heart outside his own ribs.