Quotes About Empathy

I thought as I walked back to the airport—I thought: I know what that man feels like. (Except of course I do not.) But I thought: It's odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself.

Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can't stand the blah-blah-blah.

In case you haven't noticed, people get hard-hearted against the people they hurt. Because we can't stand it. Literally. To think we did that to someone. I did that. So we think of all the reasons why it's okay we did whatever we did.

on some very fundamental level, I feel invisible in the world.

Everyone thinks like themselves, this is my point.

She understood that Simon was a disappointed man if he needed, at this age, to tell her he had pitied her for years.

Olive finished the doughnut, wiped the sugar from her fingers, sat back and said, "You're starving." The girl didn't move, only said, "Uh-duh." "I'm starving too," Olive said. The girl looked over at her. "I am," Olive said. "Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?" "You're not starving," Nina said in disgust. "Sure I am. We all are.

we never know, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully. It seems a simple thought, but as I get older I see more and more that she had to tell us that.

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.

The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had—their inner selves brushing up against the other.

At times these days—rarely, very rarely, but at times—I feel like I've become, oh, just a tiny—tiny—bit better as a person, and it makes me sick that Henry didn't get any of that from me.

We are alone in these things that we suffer.

Olive glanced at him quickly. He was crying. She looked away, and from the corner of her eye, she saw him reach into his pocket, heard him blow his nose, a real honk. "My wife died in December," he said. Olive watched the river. "Then, you're in hell," she said. "Then, I'm in hell.

We want the news that is kept secret, the unsayable things that occur in the dark crevices of the mind on a night when insomnia visits. We want to know, I think, what it is like to be another person, because somehow this helps us position our own self in the world.

It was Henry's nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, 'Gosh, I'm awful sorry to hear that, ' or 'Say, isn't that something?

Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do

It was to be taken seriously, Olive saw this. All love was to be taken seriously, including her own brief love for her doctor. But Betty had kept this love close to her heart for years and years; she had needed it that much. Olive finally said, leaning forward in her chair, "Here's what I think, young lady. I think you're doin' excellent." Then she sat back. What a thing love was. Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck.

It was terrible, though, when you couldn't tell people things. Olive felt this keenly as the days went by.

She thought how she had passed by him when he'd asked for a hug, how she had seen her mother do that to him, too, only sometimes Anita would touch his shoulders and kiss the air beside his cheek. Maybe Julie was right

sometimes just feel sorry for everyone in this whole wide world?" And

Everyone, she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves. Except Sibby had been interested in her, and she had been terribly interested in him. This was the skin that protected you from the world—this loving of another person you shared your life with.

And she learned—freshly, scorchingly—of the privacy of sorrow. It was as though she had been escorted through a door into some large and private club that she had not even known existed. Women who miscarried. Society did not care much for them. It really didn't. And the women in the club mostly passed each other silently. People outside the club said, "You'll have another one.

But in Jim O'Casey there had been a wariness, a quiet anger, and she had seen herself in him, had said to him once, We're both cut from the same piece of bad cloth. He had just watched her, eating his apple.

oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose