Quotes About Empathy

She doesn't speak, and I say nothing more. We just stare at each other, letting the tears roll down our cheeks. That's what tears are for, after all. A way for the soul to bleed.

One of the gifts of a long marriage is the ability to communicate anything—from mild displeasure to the meaning of life—with a single glance. It's something you develop in the process of mixing your soul with your spouse's, if you're willing to mix your soul.

Faculty X is the ability to grasp the reality not simply of other times and places, but of the present moment as well.

It doesn't help an animal to cry when it's in pain. But it does it.

Our findings point more and more to the conclusion that the Outsider is not a freak, but is only more sensitive than the 'sanguine and healthy-minded

The capacity to suffer. Elwood--all the Nickel boys--existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

Throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.

Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Why do you watch TV shows — and keep watching them — if you don't like them? Terence asked. Simple: Some days, all you have is gazing upon horror, and the small comfort of being surprised that it is not yours.

To think of those Nickel nights where the only sounds were tears and insects, how you could sleep in a room crammed with sixty boys and still understand that you were the only person on earth. Everybody and nobody around at the same time. Here everybody was around and by some miracle you didn't want to wring their neck but give them a hug.

see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.

The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.

one might think one's misfortunes distinct, but the true horror lay in their universality

To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment.

The loneliness is the worst, because this knowledge is something that cannot be shared, only suffered. Just as well. Why should anyone else have it easy. Spoken like a true New Yorker.

He had nerve damage: input could not penetrate. The world stalled out at his edges. Sometimes he had trouble speaking to other people, rummaging for language, and it seemed to him that an invisible layer divided him from the rest of the world, a membrane of emotional surface tension.

At the end of the day when she propped him up and told him he could do it, he puzzled over these alien things she offered him. Kindness and faith, he didn't know which box to put them in.

Reverend King's equation. Throw us in jail and we will still love you…But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. No, he could not make that leap to love.

All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together." —

För det är vad man gör när man tar någons barn – stjäl deras framtid.

To see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own—such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be any moment. If your eyes met, both parties looked away. But this man did not. He nodded before passersby took him from

Att se bojor på en annan människa och vara glad att de inte är ens egna – sådan var den lycka som stod färgade till buds, de som definierades av hur mycket värre det närsomhelst kunde blir.

Not because any attack on his brother was an attack on himself, like they said in church, but because for him to do nothing was to undermine his own dignity.