Quotes About Empathy

And you're wounded in the same place. That's what fathers do if they don't heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

Most of the people I met on the PCT passed only briefly through my life, but I was enriched by each of them. They made me laugh they made me think, they made me go on another day, and most of all, they made me trust entirely in the kindness of strangers.

we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.

Do you know what boundaries are? The best, sanest people on the planet do.

It's such a cliché, but it's true: you must set boundaries. Fucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not.

The only place I could reach her. In me.

It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me. I couldn't even hate her properly. I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again.

when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.

If we rise, they will rise with us every time, no matter how many times we've fallen before. I hope you will remember that the next time you fail. I hope I will too.

I'm also reminded of how those words no longer belong only to me; how, when we identify with what another has said or written, we use those words as an articulation of our own inner voices, not only as a celebration of theirs.

Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity.

When you feel terrible because someone has gotten something you want, you force yourself to remember how very much you have been given. You remember that there is plenty for all of us. You remember that someone else's success has absolutely no bearing on your own.

once my mother started dying, something inside of me was dead to Paul, no matter what he did or said. ..What did he know about losing anything? His parents were still alive and happily married to each other. My connection with him and his gloriously unfractured life only seemed to increase my pain. It wasn't his fault. Being with him felt unbearable, but being with anyone else did too. The only person I could bear to be with was the most unbearable person of all: my mother.

We are obligated to the people we care about and who we allow to care about us, where we say we love them or not.

The Dream of a Common Language

Withholding distorts reality. It makes the people who do the withholding ugly and small-hearted. It makes the people from whom things are withheld crazy and desperate and incapable of knowing what they actually feel. So release yourself from that. Don't be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic.

I'd reached the point where if a character in one of the novels I was reading happened to be eating, I had to skip over the scene because it simply hurt too much to read about what I wanted and couldn't have. I

Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

We didn't exchange a word. Not because we felt so alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two.

I'm sorry," she said and reached over and squeezed his leg. She couldn't help but think that she'd ruined his life. It didn't yet occur to her to wonder about having ruined her own.

She was kindhearted and forgiving, generous and naïve.

One of my dearest friends took the photograph of me she kept in a frame, ripped it in half, and mailed it to me.

When my mother asked him for more morphine, she asked for it in a way that I have never heard anyone ask for anything. A mad dog. He did not look at her when she asked him this, but at his wristwatch. He held the same expression on his face regardless of the answer. Sometimes he gave it to her without a word, and sometimes he told her no in a voice as soft as his penis in his pants.

As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn't put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be.