Quotes About Empathy

Take what people give you. Drink their milkshakes.

Eventually, I reached the other side of the chasm and understood the differences between the two men. I no longer hated Daddy: he had been a shitty father and a shitty husband - a man who's made two bad choices based on lust and coveting and then been too weak either to live with them or undo them. But he had not been a rapist.

You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner.

For a quick moment, I saw Grandma as she saw herself: a decent woman whom God, for unfathomable reasons, had chosen to punish. I almost loved her for her bewilderment. I almost touched her.

And in taking on the subject of themselves-making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader-they have exchanged powerlessness for for the power that comes with self-awareness.

Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That's when I seen that she has freckles.

So maybe that's what love means. Having the capacity to forgive the one who wronged you, no matter how deep the hurt was.

You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer, we could call you a scrupulous coroner.

You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you.

Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others.

my sympathy. And my gratitude." "Your gratitude? For what?" "For sharing that information with me. I know you are a private person, Mr. Birdsey. Thank you for trusting me.

She flinched when I did it, and that involuntary response of hers satisfied me in some small, cheap way. I never claimed I was lovable. Never said I wasn't a son of a bitch.

Motherless children have a hard time when the mother is gone.

Too bad I didn't know you back then, I would have come and rescued you. Like he was Prince Charming or something. Which he is, in a way, because he rescued me from the simple, uncomplicated life I thought I liked until I realized how much I was missing. How lonely that life had been: going to work, going home, and watching TV, going places by myself on weekends.

What if, that afternoon in my office, I had stood and risked fatherhood? Offered him a pair of sheltering arms? Would it have been enough to keep him from going down there and doing what he did? What if? What if? What if? ...

that we need to be charitable to one another because it's the right thing to do, "not because it allows us to rack up mileage points for our trip to some imaginary heaven.

Forgiveness is the rich loam from which love can grow.

Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.

He took his hamburger out of the box, bit a large crescent shape out of it, and chewed. I looked away. "I've been thinking," he said. "Our apartment lease is up in less than three months. What do you say we move down to your grandmother's house." "I've been thinking, too," I said. "In a way, you raped her." "What?" "Your high school girlfriend. Sheila. You raped her.

Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way, I told myself. I bet she's had a very hard life.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?

Love the earth and sun and animals, Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, Stand up for the stupid and crazy, Devote your income and labor to others... And your very flesh shall be a great poem.

Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.