Quotes About Empathy

He didn't do anything. I'm the one. I broke my own heart.

The thought of my youthful lack of humility made me nauseous now. I had been an arrogant asshole and, in the midst of that, my mother died.

You must love in order to be loved. You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included. You must give in order to receive.

We'd have long conversations during which I'd weep and tell him everything and he would cry with me and try to make it all just a tiny bit more okay, but his words rang hollow. It was almost as if I couldn't hear them at all. What did he know about losing anything?

I can't do this," he kept repeating through his tears. "I can't live without Mom. I can't. I can't. I can't." "We have to," I replied, though I couldn't believe it myself.

I howled and howled and howled, rooting my face into her body like an animal.

ucked-up people will try to tell you otherwise, but boundaries have nothing to do with whether you love someone or not. They are not judgments, punishments, or betrayals. They are a purely peaceable thing: the basic principles you identify for yourself that define the behaviors that you will tolerate from others, as well as the responses you will have to those behaviors. Boundaries teach people how to treat you and they teach you how to respect yourself

They were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I'd done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn't do anything differently than I had done?

Sometimes those we forgive change their behavior to the extent that we can eventually be as close to them as we were before (or even closer).

He was the first person I'd met who was doing essentially what I was doing, though he was hiking much farther. He didn't need me to explain what I was doing out here. He understood.

The same as she'd always done when she'd seen me suffer because I wanted something to be different than it was and she was trying to convince me with that single word that I must accept things as they were.

Books] were the world I could lose myself in when the one I was actually in became too lonely or harsh or difficult to bear.

There's nothing you can tell Sugar that doesn't strike her as beautiful and human. Which is why men and women write to her about intimacies they can't share with anyone else, unspeakable urges, insoluble grief. She understands that attention is the first and final act of love, and that the ultimate dwindling resource in the human arrangement isn't cheap oil or potable water or even common sense, but mercy.

The standard you should apply in deciding whether or not to have an active relationship with him is the same one you should apply to all the relationships in your life: you will not be mistreated or disrespected or manipulated.

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. I don't say this as a condemnation—I need regular reminders to stop feeling sorry for myself too.

I'm going to address you bluntly, but it's a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you.

It all matters - every sin, every regret, every affliction. As a proof, she offered an account of her own struggle to reckon with a cruelty she'd absorbed.

It will never be okay," a friend who lost her mom in her teens said to me a couple years ago. "It will never be okay that our mothers are dead.

Telling has a way of dispersing things. It will allow your lover to stand closer inside the circle of you. Let him.

when we're in the presence of someone else's pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it's a small thing. Like writing a letter.

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

your sister was attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up.