Quotes About Empathy

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can't go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

every last one of us will need to fuck up and be forgiven, that we're all just walking and walking and walking and trying to find our way,

Let yourself be gutted. Let it open you. Start there.

Our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at one point or another. You're in a pickle. You did things you didn't hope to do. You have not always been your

I've long believed literature's greatest superpower is how it makes us feel less alone.

feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what's horribly true.

How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.

enough compassion to make us feel safe within our broken need, and enough wisdom to hold on to hope.

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

You Don't Have to Be Broken for Me

I want to see the contours of your second beating heart.

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

Boundaries teach people how to treat you, and they teach you how to respect yourself.

What you've got left after all the fools have departed are the old souls and the true hearts.

There is a world of people out here who will love you for who you are. A whole, vibrant, fucked-up, happy, conflicted, joyous, and depressed mass of people who will say, You're gay? So the fuck what? We want you to be among us. That's the message of the It Gets Better Project. Hold on, it says, and stick it out, because guess what? It gets better.

I think the answer to most problems is more often than not outside of the right/wrong binary that we tend to cling to when we're angry or scared or in pain. We are complicated people. Our lives do not play out in absolutes.

This is to be expected. It is as it should be. Though we live in a time and place and culture that tries to tell us otherwise, suffering is what happens when truly horrible things happen to us

But I want you to know that you don't need to tell me this to get me to love you. You don't have to be broken for me.

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.

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first.

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.

After I blew kisses to the guys flipping me off, they smiled and gave me heart hands back.

Who cares if one more light goes out? In a sky of a million stars It flickers, flickers

Your voice was joy and pain, anger and forgiveness, love and heartache all wrapped up into one. I suppose that's what we all are. You helped me understand that.