Quotes About Empathy

The Hegemony and its relationship with the Ousters aren't my worry now. I sincerely wish a plague on both their houses. To the extent that humanity suffers?" "I don't know humanity," said the Consul in an exhausted monotone. "I do know Sol Weintraub. And Rachel. And an injured woman named Brawne Lamia. And Father Paul Duré. And Fedmahn Kassad. And—

In the end, it doesn't matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone. Goddamn it hurts.

Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.

The critic had added a personal note: Most of us, I hope, have had some child or spouse or friend like Beatrice, someone who by his very nature, his seemingly innate goodness and intelligence, makes us uncomfortably conscious of our lies when we lie.

Crawford reacted in the fashion of small towns immemorial – some tongues wagged constantly, some people could not keep the pity and pleasure at someone else's misfortune out of their voices and gazes – but mostly the community folded its protective wings around the Weintraub family like an awkward mother bird shielding its young

In the end, it doesn't matter a damn bit. We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt. It doesn't matter a damn bit. We're no avatars, no sons of god or man. We're only us, scribbling our conceits alone, reading alone, and dying alone.

It is at times like this that I have the sense… the slightest sense… of what a sacrifice it must have been for the Son of God to condescend to become the Son of Man.

was being greeted by a silent, smiling band of bald, retarded children.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity." "Empathy," Aenea said softly.

in the prohibited Cantos. That poem had talked about empathy being the key to human spiritual evolution. The Church had corrected that, pointing out that obeying God's Will was the source of revelation and salvation.

The infant looked up at him and Sol felt the contact of her consciousness as surely as if she had spoken aloud.

And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our species to them and measure the empathy of which we are capable.

We thought we were special, opening our perceptions, honing our empathy, spilling that cauldron of shared pain onto the dance floor of language and then trying to make a minuet out of all that chaotic hurt.

Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity." "Empathy," Aenea said softly. Father Glaucus turned his blind eyes in her direction. "Precisely, my dear.

entreaties.

Colonel Kassad stepped closer and laid long fingers on the poet's shoulder. For a few seconds the room seemed warmed by the mere fact of human contact.

Thinking none of this but feeling all of it

For years I have carried on silent conversations with Siri, framing questions to myself for future discussion with her, and it suddenly strikes me with cold clarity that we will never again sit together and talk. An emptiness begins to grow inside me. Should

I have a theory that as long as you have one good friend, one real friend, you can get through anything.

My brother, he says. My brother is dead. And again he asks me to kill him. One more time before he falls to his knees and sobs. And i get it. I do. Because i have a brother too.

But here's something that I know about friendship: Sometimes the right thing to do is to not point out that your friend hasn't touched her chicken fingers or French fries and not point that maybe she's just overreacting. Instead, you just smile and sit with her and say, I understand when really, you don't understand her at all.

Friends, I was pretty sure, lift their friends up; they don't weigh them down like a sack full of stones

While in Aspen, I was on a panel one evening with Andre Dubus III, who spoke of what happens when a memoir devolves into self-pity: "Wah, wah, wah. Should we call the wambulance?

think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be," wrote Joan Didion in her essay "On Keeping a Notebook," "whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, and who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.