Quotes About Empathy

And what I thought was, you could probably go into any church anywhere in the world and see a middle-aged woman, no husband in sight, pushing a young lad in a wheelchair. It was one of the reasons churches were invented, probably.

conversation was not something imposed from above, like an examination. It was more like a sofa that worked out the shape of your arse and adjusted accordingly

Women who disapprove of men—and there's plenty to disapprove of—should remember how we started out, and how far we have had to travel. 3.

We spent all those years talking about the stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different, and it broke both of our hearts.

He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.

Kau harus hidup dalam gelembungmu sendiri. Kau tidak bisa memaksa masuk ke dalam gelembung milik orang lain, karena dengan begitu, itu tak lagi menjadi gelembung.

Books are, let's face it better then everything else

I didn't want people feeling sorry for me, you see. I wanted them to help, even if helping meant saying that they wouldn't help

Sensitive people find it harder to stick around.

There is such a shelter in each other.

Let me be clear and accomodative, more like water than ice; and raise my hands to show I mean no harm, and that I'm stupid, and malicious, and if I'm trying to be fearless I know it gives me no right to act like this.

Do you really feel that out of place, that lonely? Because I feel that lonely, too. Sometimes I feel like I'm just watching my daily life play out on a giant projection screen, while I'm living my real life in my head, or something. I don't know. If I was in a room with a thousand people, I'd still feel alone.

What often fails to be appreciated by everybody is just how significant an act of leadership it is, simply to give somebody your undivided attention for a while.

Mom? I said. She turned. Can I talk to you about something? Of course, darling. Come here. I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say. I need you to be -- I said, and then I started to cry. Be what? she said, opening her arms. Not sad, I said.

When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be.

He held my hand and told me a story about when he was six and threw a rock at a kid's head who was bullying his brother, and how after that no one had bothered either of them again. 'You have to stick up for yourself,' he told me. 'But it's bad to throw rocks,' I said. 'I know. You're smarter than me. You'll find something better than rocks.

He wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard.

There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes matter worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.

Sometimes these misunderstandings were even desirable, since they gave people a reason to say 'Forgive me, I was only scratching my nose. Of course I know I've always been right to love you.' Because of the frequency of these mistakes, over time the gesture for asking forgiveness evolved into the simplest form. Just to open your palm was to say: Forgive me.

I had the elated, otherworldly feeling I sometimes get entering the sphere of another's life, when for a moment changing my banal habits and living like that seems entirely possible, a feeling that always dissolves by the next morning, when I wake up to the familiar, unmovable shapes of my own life.

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.

And he isn't crying for her, not for his grandma, he's crying for himself: that he: too, is going to die one day. And before that his friends wil die, and the friends of his friends, and, as time passes, the children of his friends, and, if his fate is truly bitter, his own children. (58)

I helped those in, who were locked out, others i helped keep out, what couldn't be let in, so that they could sleep without nightmares.

I simply came to believe that one, the factual circumstances of my life were almost accidental and didn't grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it