Quotes About Empathy

The world had somehow gone too far, and spontaneous kindness could never be so easy.

it's good to have things done with when they don't work it's also good not to hate or even forget the person you've failed with.

I am sick with caring.

Christmas poem to a man in jail hello Bill Abbott: I appreciate your passing around my books in jail there, my poems and stories. if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with my books, fine. but literature, you know, is difficult for the average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too); I don't like most poetry, for example, so I write mine the way I like to read it.

how can you be true and kind at the same time? how?

people need me. I fill them. if they can't see me for awhile the get desperate, they get sick. but if I see them too often I get sick. it's hard to feed without getting fed.

We've died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.

Even the stove and the refrigerator looked human, I mean good human - they seemed to have arms and voices and they said, hang around, kid, it's good here, it can be very good here.

I like to prowl ordinary places and taste the people- from a distance.

Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.

Why can't you be decent to people? she asked. Fear, I said.

She knew what she wanted and it wasn't me. I know more women like that than any other kind.

The shoulder blades sticking out as if they wanted to grow wings through that skin. Little blades, she was helpless.

The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it - basically because you feel goo, very good, when you are near or with them.

When someone else's truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that's great.

But you know, my former life as a bibliophile, it possibly kept me from murdering somebody, myself included. it kept me from being an industrialist. it allowed me to endure some women that most men would never be able to live with. it gave me space, a pause. it helped me to write this.

alone tonight in this house, alone with 6 cats who tell me without effort all that there is to know.

Parker had a young white boy with him-one of the neurotic tribe of the lost- and the kid's eyes were filled with wet layers of tears. One big tear in each eye. They did not drop out. It was fascinating. I had seen women sit and look at me with those same eyes before they got mad and started screaming about what a son of a bitch I was.

Once in a rare lifetime have you ever been in a roomful of people who only helped you when you looked at them, listened to them. this was one of those magic times. I knew it.

I suppose that at last like the average man: I've known too many women and instead of thinking, I wonder who's fucking her now? I think she's giving some other poor son of a bitch much trouble right now.

That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.

did she love you? only as an extension of herself. what else can love be? the common sense to care very much for something very good. it needn't be related by bloodline. it can be a red beachball or a piece of buttered toast.

There's too much coldness in the world, I told her. If people would only talk things out together it would help.

People need me. I fill them. If they can't see me for a while they get desperate, they get sick. But if I see them too often I get sick. It's hard to feed without getting fed.