Quotes About Empathy

They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.

Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

Perhaps only those people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the world.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.

She looked at him, and oh, the weariness to her, of the effort to understand another language, the weariness of hearing him, attending to him, making out who he was, as he stood there fair-bearded and alien, looking at her. She knew something of him, of his eyes. But she could not grasp him. She closed her eyes.

You know, he said, with an effort, 'if one person loves, the other does.' …'I hope so, because if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing,' she said. 'Yes, but it is - at least with most people,' he answered.

And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness have that look of being alone in the universe

Sex is really only touch, the closest of all touch. And it's touch we're afraid of. We're only half-conscious, and half-alive. We've for to come alive and aware. Especially the English have got to get into touch with one another, a bit delicate and a bit tender. It's our crying need.

And she had discovered him, discovered in him a rare potentiality, discovered his loneliness.

I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies-thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.

You musn't mind people so much. They're not being disagreeable to you -- it's their way. You always think people are meaning things for you. But they don't.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.

Ce vreau eu sa stiu - ce ma nedumereste pe mine - este cum pot oamenii care traiesc in aceeasi tara, care vorbesc aceeasi limba, care citesc aceleasi ziare si asa mai departe, sa fie atat de deosebiti, realmente deosebiti, in sentimentele lor. Asta nu pot sa inteleg.

Little by little, living together, two people fall into a sort of unison, they vibrate so intricately to one another. That's the real secret of marriage

You live most intensely in human contact- and that's what we shrink from, poor timid creatures, from giving our souls to somebody to touch; for they, bungling fools, will generally paw it with dirty hands

His heart melted suddenly, like a drop of fire, and he put out his hand and laid his fingers on her knee. "You shouldn't cry," he said softly. But then she put her hands over her face and felt that really her heart was broken and nothing mattered anymore.

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people, Connie was frightened. There was something devastatingly true in what he said. But it was a truth that killed.

A new degree of anger came over him. What did it all matter? What did it matter if the mother talked Polish and cried in labour, if this child were stiff with resistance, and crying?Why take it to heart?Let the mother cry in labour, let the child cry in resistance, since they would do so. Why should he fight against it, why resist? Let it be, if it were so. Let them be as they were, if they insisted.

She was grieved, and bitterly sorry for the man who was hurt so much. But still, in her heart of hearts, where the love should have burned, there was a blank. Now, when all her woman's pity was roused to its full extent, when she would have slaved herself to death to nurse him and to save him, when she would have taken the pain herself, if she could, somewhere far away inside her she felt indifferent to him and to his suffering. It hurt her most of all, this failure to love him.

He crouched down, and carefully put his finger through the thorns into the round door of the nest. It's almost as if you were feeling inside the live body of the bird, he said... After that, Miriam came to see it everyday. It seemed so close to her. Again, going down the hedge side with the girl, he noticed the celandines, scalloped slashes of gold, on the side of the ditch. I like them, he said, when their petals go flat back with the sunshine. They seem to be pressing themselves at the sun.

She never suffered alone any more: the children suffered with her.

What man in his senses would say such things to a woman! But men aren't in their senses. What man with a spark of honour would put this ghastly burden of life-responsibility upon a woman, and leave her there, in the void?

All men are babies, when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some of the toughest customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let anything ail them so that you have to do for them, and they're babies, just big babies. Oh, there's not much difference in men!