Quotes About Empathy

Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

Please don't be alarmed, you'd be surprised how many charming people are walking our streets, the mere ghosts of themselves.

I think people need other people to be kind to them.

The hands were saying: Why do you hurt me like this?—but if you insist then I'll endure it.

What is a hero without love for mankind?

The important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Anna directed the silent, compassionate thought towards her daughter: Well my poor girl, you'd better get used to it early, because you're going to have to live in a world full of it.

But you know how it is—it's always that moment, when a man looks all wounded in his masculinity, one can't bear it, one needs to bolster him up." "Yes, but they just kick us afterwards as hard as they can, so why do we do it?" "Yes, but I never seem to learn.

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

It's painful thinking of the people one has been cruel to.

I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe.

M?i ng??i ??u ch? là k? ?n th?t ng??i n?u nhÆ° không ?? cho nhau ???c yên.

And while the cruelties of the white man toward the black man are among the heaviest counts of the indictment against humanity, colour prejudice is not our original fault, but only one aspect of the atrophy of the imagination that prevents us from seeing ourselves in every creature that breathes under the sun.

I think novelists perform many useful tasks for their fellow citizens, but one of the most valuable is this: to enable us to see ourselves as others see us.

Why am I so ungrateful when I suffer so little compared to other women?

Por qué siento esta necesidad tan horrible de forzar a los otros a que vean las cosas como yo? Es infantil; ¿por qué habrían de hacerlo? En el fondo, me da miedo encontrarme a solas con mis sentimientos.

A friend drops their plans when you're in trouble, shares joy in your accomplishments, feels sad when you're in pain. A friend encourages your dreams and offers advice--but when you don't follow it, they still respect and love you.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

For that is of course what it means to read a novel and live in it for a while. You are viscerally inside someone else's reality. You feel and understand things you have not known before, and that is both scary and exhilarating. The world becomes more clear, reality more vivid, and your own experience larger.

When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, I can't fix it, girl. I can't fix anything. If you don't as me to fix it, you can ask anything else. If you can say what you need, I'll try to give it to you.

that the biggest part of the struggle as a child is about trying to believe you are not the monster you are being told you are.

Entitlement, I have told them, is a matter of feeling like we rather than they.

stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.