Quotes About Empathy

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active

I need to say: This is the question that has made me a writer; always that deep desire to know what it feels like to be a different person.

On the "hit-thumb theory" : "On his grandfather's roof as a child one summer, hammering tiles down hard, he'd discovered that if you hammered your thumb by mistake, there was a split second when you thought: Hey, this isn't so bad, considering how hard I was hit… And then—after that moment of false, bewildered, and grateful relief—came the crash and crush of real pain.

Cindy looked up at this woman before her; she saw in her eyes a distinct light. "I can call you Olive. Hello, Olive." Cindy looked around and said, "Here, pull up that chair.

Do I understand that hurt my children feel? I think I do, though they might claim otherwise. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can't even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. People thought love would do it, and maybe it did.

Americans really did not understand desperation.

What a really awful thing I had done. I had not thought of this until now. To deny my husband any chance of comforting me—oh, it was an unspeakably awful thing. And I had not known. This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.

the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when—as in her own case—it was temporary. She

They had somehow taken a group of women from the town through the (concentration) camps to show them what had been right there, and Tommy's brother said that although some of the women wept, some of them put their chins up, and looked angry, as if they refused to be made to feel bad.

you don't feel jealous of a woman whose husband has been lost. But an unreachability, that's how she'd put it. This plump, kind-natured woman sitting on the couch surrounded by children

I felt terrible for this man who used to be my husband. We talked a long time about Estelle and Bridget, and then a little bit about our girls; he asked that he be the one to tell Chrissy and Becka about Estelle leaving, and I said, Of course.

the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.

Elizabeth Strout

I care," Olive said. "I care because it says something about you. When you're attracted to crap, it says something about you.

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.

And remorse, well, to be able to show remorse—to be able to be sorry about what we've done that's hurt other people—that keeps us human.

We're all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard as we can, we love imperfectly, Angelina, but it's okay.

and she seemed to really listen, I could see her listening, and she responded exactly right somehow. I cannot remember what she said, but I remember thinking, Oh, she is right here with me.

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.

My job is to help you get into the world, but you do not belong to me.

People know exactly who loves them, and how much—

have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that's what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.

But when I think Oh William!, don't I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don't I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!