Quotes About Empathy

Mothers send strips to daughters to make a point. Daughters smack strips down on the breakfast table to make a point. My own mom sometimes cuts a strip out and sends it to me to make sure I understand her.

I had such a close relationship with my dog, and my dog so filled the need in my life to have children that I just wanted Cathy to have that experience.

Maybe it wasn't that he didn't want to talk about himself before now, she thought guiltily. Maybe it's just that I wasn't interested in listening.

It's like we're fairweather friends, pals if everything is hunky-dory. Friends are supposed to talk about things, weather the storms. Be friends, come what may. Resolve problems. Not first sign of trouble and ooh, we're not talking to you. It's pathetic. And now I'm mad.

Closeness means you get hurt; closeness means letting down your defences and letting people see the tender skin under the carapace.

You don't have to put yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm.

Bharat Mehra, Cecelia Merkel,

Of course, "white tears" does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion.

In other words, can I apologize without demanding your forgiveness?

I sometimes avoid reading a news story when the victim is Asian, because I don't want to pay attention to the fact that no one else is paying attention. I don't want to care that no one else cares. Because I don't want to be left stranded in my rage.

I wish you'd read your poems," she said sternly. "We need poems to heal." "I'm not ready to heal," I said as gently as I could because I was afraid how she'd respond. She nodded. "I respect that," she said, and walked away.

I wanted a Korean American therapist because I wouldn't have to explain myself as much. She'd look at me and just know where I was coming from. Out of the hundreds of New York therapists available on the Aetna database of mental health care providers, I found exactly one therapist with a Korean surname

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?

Shame gives me the ability to split myself into the first and third person. To recognize myself, as Sartre writes, "as the Other sees me.

Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining.

That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the entitled white protagonist but then mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as if it were my own in overrated classics like Catcher in the Rye.

Can I write honestly? Not only about how much I've been hurt but how I have hurt others? And can I do it without steeping myself in guilt, since guilt demands absolution and is therefore self-serving? In other words, can I apologize without demanding your forgiveness? Where do I begin?

No matter our income, my family could not cough up the thorn embedded in our chests.

Almost daily, my mother demanded gratitude from me. Almost weekly, my mother said we moved here so I wouldn't have to suffer. Then she asked, "Why do you make yourself suffer?

My life overlaps with the lives of others so I have no choice but to take from others, which is why writers are full of care, but also— if they're at all truthful — a bit cruel.

In his book White Flights, the writer Jess Row says that "America's great and possibly catastrophic failure is its failure to imagine what it means to live together.

I'm sure there are even some kind guys nice in here, but . . .

He didn't ask you for your opinion on what he was doing as far as a break—he was telling you what he needed," Emily reminded her. "So you don't get to decide that he has to talk to you now. He walked away. When he's ready, then he can always come back and talk to you.