Quotes About Empathy

time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a preexisting category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see—feel—only what is individual and particular to them.

Not a touch, not a kiss, not a word, let alone a scheme or a plan. But there was already, just in the way we sat in the car, before she said a few laughing words and then walked off up her driveway, a complicity between us. Not, I insist, as yet a complicity to do anything. Just a complicity which made me a little more me, and her a little more her.

when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet—and this is curious—the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another.

But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.

Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?

The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.

Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

She wasn't sure if they meant to be hurtful or if they were just profoundly tactless.

moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to

To know someone, to be known. That matters more than he'd ever thought it would.

Perhaps we're all doomed to fail as mothers, but if so, it's better to err on the side of showing too much love, not too little.

I don't know you. That's the problem.

And before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and with a thumb brushed away one teardrop glistening in that mauve crescent beneath her eyes. And then he looked down at his thumb, and rubbed the tear out of existence, right into his skin.

Some of us walk about with the burden of old wounds. What must it be like to have the burden of…healing?

Your happiness, quite simply, is my happiness. Cynthia slowly closed her eyes against the look in his. Cannot bear.

Gentleness was sometimes perilously close to pity.

She settled upon the hound. She met its brown eyes. It blinked slowly in what she liked to think was sympathy. Neither of them wanted to be where they were at the moment.

talking to him this morning had been like taking that first bite of an orange. That first sip of black, black coffee. He listened as though she mattered precisely as much as he did. How disorienting this quality was to encounter in a man.

Because he spoke to her the way no one else had ever spoken to her, which meant he saw her in a way no one else saw her.

It's just that no one can completely take care of themselves. Not even me, and I have a freaking black belt in karate. It's not a man versus woman thing. It's a 'let somebody care about you thing.' And sometimes that takes more guts and sense than taking on the whole damn world by yourself.

Something was stirring in him, though; a bud of comprehension that could very well bloom into forgiveness if left unchecked.

She suspected she looked upon greatness for the first time in the form of a dusty, weary, rueful vicar, who did things like hold the hand of an old woman as she breathed her last breath and throw his fist into the jaw of a man who slurred her questionable honor and came in the dead of night to sit by the bed of her maid.

they were coming into focus to each other. As though each of them was a sun, burning away each other's obscuring mists.