Quotes About Empathy

Two people can brave the taunts that one person finds intolerable.

It's exhausting, meaning well in a world that assumes you're a pig because of the body you're born into, but then—it's so much

Whenever I got cross with him, I would think about that girl at the bus stop, how unhappy she was, how she thought no one could ever want to take her on a date, much less love her. It may sound silly, but I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did.

I'd come home but nearly everybody does. It's the ones that don't go home that I feel sorry for, they're not happy.

What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether?

We say 'Thank you very much' and 'I so appreciate what you have done' to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offer us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether? And if I use the same old words, did I change what I was trying to say? Did I make it a same old thing?

Sometimes it's not that you don't want help. It's that you can't bear to be offered help that just keeps turning out not to be enough after all.

We say 'Thank you very much' and 'I so appreciate what you have done' to people who fill our grocery bags, to people who offere us a ride across town. What are the words to say to someone who gave you back your life, who believed that you still had a soul, who acknowledged how bad it was possible to feel? Shouldn't there be another language for this? Different words altogether? And if I use the same old words, did I change what I was trying to say? Did I make it a same old thing?

What literature could accomplish by way of moral education was less instruction than an expansion of our capacity for empathy: "it admits us to experiences other than our own.

there's a difference between wanting all stories you read to be about you in the most literal sense, and reading with the hope that you can find a bit of yourself in all stories, however alien they may seem on the surface. When our capacity to identify withers, so does a portion of our humanity.

You could push people away, past their limits, even accidentally, and then it was just too late to get them back

My mother says that when Mrs. Rowley is mean, which is generally the case, it is really because she is just unhappy, and who could blame her with a husband like that . . . She says this is really the only reason people are ever mean--they have something hurting inside of them, a claw of unhappiness scratching at their hearts, and it hurts them so much that sometimes they have to push it right out of their mouths to scratch someone else, just to give themselves a rest, a moment of relief.

she also knew that the sadness she felt while pregnant, for strangers, for the entire world, did not feel like hormones so much as a kind of elevated consciousness, a heightened sensitivity to truth.

but even more than that, she could have been born anywhere in the world, and to anyone, she and her loved ones suffering in ways she could barely fathom when she listened to the international news.

Because the difference between a friend and a real friend is that you and the real friend come from the same territory, of the same place deep inside you, and that means you see the world in the same kind of way. You know each other even before you do.

I'll figure out how to be truer: to let people go if they need to be let go of, and to hold on tight if that's what's called for. I will pay attention, so I can cross each human heart that comes across my path, cross it as true as I can.

And isn't it funny how if one person speaks for real, then the other person can too? We just did that. We just became friends. It's just a matter of finding the right person and crossing that barrier together, almost like you're holding hands, but really you're holding the most tender place inside you.

She swishes her arms back and forth. "Okay." Her voice is small and quiet like a mourning dove, like the soft gray on a mourning dove's back.

Oh, Ben," she whispers. "I've sunk as low as I can get. All the sudden. Today," and then says, more loudly and firmly, "You

On a day like today, there's no friend like a book.

yo tenía la certeza absoluta de que ese momento de la llegada empataría con el de la partida sin ninguna fisura, en dócil solución de continuidad.

No es un monstruo -insiste-, es un ser humano. Y ésa es la tragedia, que esto lo ha hecho un ser humano.

Una mujer como usted debe haber roto muchos corazones... - En el pasado, tal vez. A mi edad, el único corazón que uno rompe es el propio.

Maybe it didn't matter how he was crazy, only the fact that he was, the fact that he wanted someone to be crazy with him.