Quotes About Empathy

If men ever got periods, believe me, you'd all be in a ball on the ground from cramps.

Did you not understand me? You need me to speak in Ebonics?

James slid into his seat and the girl next to him asked, "What's wrong with your eyes?" It wasn't until he heard the horror in the teacher's voice—"Shirley Byron!"—that he realized he was supposed to be embarrassed; the next time it happened, he had learned his lesson and turned red right away.

bring back our missing hearts.

condolences; a few of them pat Hannah on the head, as if she's

She waited, letting the uneasy silence grow. No one, she had learned from experience, could stand such silence for long. If you waited long enough, someone would start talking, and more often than not they would give you a chance to press further, to crack the conversation open and scoop out what you needed to know.

I'm not saying there aren't bad mothers, she says. Just that you don't always know. What makes them do something, or not do something. Most of us, we're trying our best.

Evidence of his mother, out there, elsewhere, so worried about somebody else's children though she'd left her own behind. The irony of it leached into his veins.

Izzy, sit up straight," she would say at the dinner table, thinking: Scoliosis. Cerebral palsy. "Izzy, calm down." Though she would never quite articulate it this way, resentment began to sheathe concern. ANGER IS FEAR'S BODYGUARD,

And some people chide her for coming too late. One older woman—a Choctaw woman, whose granddaughter had been taken—looked at Margaret for a long time with weary eyes, then clicked her teeth. You think this is something new? She shook her head.

All those years, as the only other person who understood their parents, he had absorbed her miseries offering silent sympathy or a squeeze on the shoulder or a wry smile.

How porous the boundary was between him and the world, as if everything flowed through him like water through a net. She'd worried about him, moving through a rough world as a tender bare heart, beating out in the open where anything could cause a bruise.

Sadie eyed him, hands on hips. Bird, she said, with infuriating pity, you don't understand anything, so you?

She would listen and listen, waiting for them to come and find her. We didn't know , Hannah thinks. We would have come.

Na maioria dos casos, toda a gente merece mais do que uma oportunidade. Todos nós fazemos coisas que lamentamos de vez em quando e que teremos de levar para sempre dentro de nós.

Qualcosa in quello scambio di sguardi tra madre e figlia aveva acciuffato il cuore di Mrs Richardson come un retino per farfalle.

He had been the only one listening for so long.

Sometimes, though, when he saw her squatting in the corner of the playground, head leaning against the chain-link fence, he turned away, so she wouldn't have to pretend to be brave. To let her be alone with her grief, or whatever heavier thing she'd put on top to hold it down.

The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you - whether because you didn't get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.

You weren't wrong, Margaret said at last. You weren't wrong. But neither was Marie. A small tug at a complicated knot that would take generations to unpick.

Ever since that summer, he had felt something still binding their ankles and tugging him off balance, fettering her weight to his. For ten years, that something had not loosened, and now it had begun to chafe. All those years, as the only other person who understood their parents, he had absorbed her miseries, offering silent sympathy or a squeeze on a shoulder or a wry smile. [...] He had buoyed her up with how too much love was better than too little.

Five years, a year, even six months earlier, Lydia would have found sympathy in her brother's eyes. I know. I know. Confirmation and consolation in a single blink. This time Nath, immersed in a library book, did not notice Lydia's clenched fingers, the sudden red that rimmed her eyes. Dreaming of his future, he no longer heard all the things she did not say.

She knew what her parents had longed for, without them saying a word, and she had wanted them happy.

She glanced at her brothers, at her mother, still in her bathrobe on their tree lawn, and thought, They have literally nothing but the clothes on their backs.