Quotes About Empathy

Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it.

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, for the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient about such people.

What you do to children matters. And they might never forget.

But Jude,' she would say, 'you knew me. All those days and years, Jude, you knew me. My ways and my hands and how my stomach folded and how we tried to get Mickey to nurse and how about that time when the landlord said...but you said...and I cried, Jude. You knew me and had listened to the things I said in the night, and heard me in the bathroom and laughed at my raggedy girdle and I laughed too because I knew you too, Jude. So how could you leave me when you knew me?

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

Come on, girl. Don't cry, whispered Frank. Why not? I can be miserable if I want to. You don't need to try and make it go away. It shouldn't go away. It's just as sad as it ought to be and I'm not going to hide from what's true just because it hurts. Cee wasn't sobbing anymore, but the tears were still running down her cheeks.

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

She seemed to fold into herself, like a pleated wing. Her pain antagonized me. I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets. But she held it in where it could lap up into her eyes.

Difficult to "move on" from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed.

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

It may even be that some of us know what it is like to be actually hated—hated for things we have no control over and cannot change.

The danger of sympathizing with the stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one's racial-ized rank is to lose one's own valued and enshrined difference.

You want a real thing?" asked Alice. "I'll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.

Someone appeared, with gentle and penetrating eyes, who - with no exchange of words - understood; and before whose glance her eyes dropped. The someone had no face, no form, no voice, no odour. He was a simple Presence, an all-embracing tenderness with strength and a promise of rest.

I want to feel what I feel. Even if it's not happiness

In the safe harbor of each other's company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.

I'll explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.

Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep—to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other:

When good people take you in and treat you good, you ought to try to be good back.

you just can't mishandle creatures and expect success.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

We will be judged by how well we love.