Quotes About Empathy

Again, Benji was reminded of the girl's absurd bravery. She had nothing to gain here. The man, Clade Berman, was nowhere near her own sister. He presented no danger to anyone but his own family. That marked her as someone who had a lot of untapped courage - there was that word again, echoing the conversation with Arav - or someone who cared little for herself or her own life. (He wondered idly, How often do those two things intertwine?)

Worry more about being a COOL HUMAN meeting other COOL HUMANS. - Chuck Wendig. To that end, Hello, said the cool human to all the others.

Maybe that's the problem with generations. You start to forget what it was like when you were like them, so they become your enemy and you become theirs and nobody understands each other. Then you die and they become you and finally, finally they understand, but by then it's too late.

A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster.

Hollis Copper knows that everyone has a story and if you want to speak to someone, you better find a way to speak to his or her story.

He just—he takes it all on the chin sometimes. Emotionally, I mean. I think his therapist calls it 'empathic,' I dunno. It's hard on him, even looking at the news—whatever bad news is going on that day. It's a burden. Wears him down.

That was key, he long felt, to an informed society, one that cleaved to both empathy and critical thinking: access to information. Simply being able to know things—true things!—meant the world to him.

Most people aren't good or evil, really, they're just messy and complicated. Inside you are two wolves, and both of them are very confused about everything all of the time. So for the most part, give people a break when you can.

Kindness is stronger than fear.

How can life be worth living, to use the words of Ennius, which lacks that repose which is to be found in the mutual good-will of a friend? What can be more delightful than to have some one to whom you can say everything with the same absolute confidence as to yourself? Is not prosperity robbed of half its value if you have no one to share your joy? On the other hand, misfortunes would be hard to bear if there were not some one to feel them even more acutely than yourself.

It made no difference what nationality or color or sex or class a person was. The suffering was the same.

I figure that if there's a heaven, then there's a room in heaven where you can look over all of history and be anyone you want to be, at a peak moment in their lives. For example, I always say I would choose to be one of Stevie Wonder's backup singers on the Innervisions album.

I confronted the fact that I was not only talking to a dog, but answering for one.

Because I know what it's like to pour your heart and soul into a book, day after day after day, when it comes to the work of other authors, I either give them five stars -- or say nothing! I simply can't bring myself to do anything else.

Because nobody knows you better than somebody who knew you way back then.

The world would be a better place if everyone just helped one another out when they needed it, in my opinion.

You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can't ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.

I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.

He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem spoke to him it was as if a brilliant, agonizing light had been turned upon some tiny, private cell of his soul.

He said that's what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen.

and of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing.

If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities.

Never let the sun go down on an argument," she said. "Because one of us might die in the night," I said, as I'd replied since I was small. But this time, she laughed, a dry, sad laugh. "One of us just might, Mouse.

If you told me my own story about someone else, I would have assured you that this person was completely unhinged. Or a child. That's always the way.