Quotes About Empathy

One death did not salve another.

Talk to me. Look up, I thought. But she didn't, only stopped and picked a sprig of alyssum to smell the honey. I cut a shred from my heart and dangled it on a homemade hook before her.

You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.

I hate people," he said, wiping the urchin's face with the rag. "Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He's poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.

Do go on," I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.

I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched on a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?

IT DIDN'T TAKE ME long to figure out why the girls called Amelia Cruella De Vil. In the beautiful wooden house, we went hungry all the time.

I don't want things. I just want to feel like someone gives a shit.

She couldn't help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn't as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.

Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.

A correspondence is a kind of love affair.

How else can we become reconciled, except one individual at a time? This Jesus you seek did not come to address nations. He washed the wounds of lepers. He dined with sinners. He healed all who came to him. One person at a time.

you of all have the most to forgive." "Ah, and if so," he responded, "I have the most blessing to receive after I've done so.

Ya hurt, Joshsh?" I thought that was quite apparent, but for someone like Sam who spent a good deal of his time on the ground, perhaps it was a reasonable question.

Nobody can tell you how the blues feel unless they have the blues. We all take it differently.

I'm not gonna say something unless I really feel comfortable around you. Unless I feel like I know you, I'm not gonna really open up.

Popularity isn't my compass. Unless it can help one to act, to be understood... that's what counts.

I don't know if you'll really get to know me unless you're close to me.

I fought a disease. I fought a disease called depression that a lot of people fight every single day. And unlike other diseases, there is a stigma surrounding it.

I can't write about someone who is unlike me in all senses-physically, emotionally and socially.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they're just like us... And when you see that they're just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.

Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it's tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake.

I never felt a feeling that I knew or could know to be unlike the feelings of other people. I never consciously thought, except after patterns that the world or my fellows set for me.