Quotes About Empathy

Tony is waiting outside, his eyes crinkled into a smile. 'Come inside the house,' he says. He knows what I am feeling. And in I go, where the dogs lie flat on the kitchen floor, tails wagging, and the kettle is whistling, and the house is very warm.

he lifted the fat and frightened hawk onto his fist reciting it passages from Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard II, Othello-- 'but tragedy had to be kept out of the voice'-- and all the sonnets he could remember, whistling hymns to it, playing it Gilbert and Sullivan and Italian opera, and deciding, on reflection, that hawks liked Shakespeare best.

You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. History

You are exercising what the poet Keats called your chameleon quality, the ability to 'tolerate a loss of self and a loss of rationality by trusting in the capacity to recreate oneself in another character or another environment'.

White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power.

You are a man whose eyes are bright with unspilled tears when you tell me of the horror of your journey here.

There are good people, kind people, too. I've got to keep thinking of them. I've got to remember them. There are people who help. Not only people who destroy.

You feel you've seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.

We're friendly toward strangers because of a general belief (I don't know where it comes from) that we're born strangers and that the memory of how that feels never really leaves us.

Easy to see the solution when you're not in the story, isn't it.

But Jess was sliding breathlessly down into the waiting sky, so she couldn't find the words to tell TillyTilly that sisters was something about being held without hands, and the skin-flinch of seeing and simultaneously being seen.

Her heart's breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off.

There were days when she'd open her eyes and be him for six hours in a row; she knew all his secrets and nothing he had done seemed wrong to her, she knew how it was, how things had been, she was there. There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty. But who finds happiness interesting?

know the risk I run when I find fault with people more often than I look for something to appreciate. It's like having grit in your eye; you see less and less of the real person standing right in front of you and more and more of the grit in your eye.

It isn't magic," she said. "It's just that I'm well dressed. You men who try to tell me I'm a scarecrow or try to grab my arm but can't manage it, don't you understand that you're not really addressing me? It's more as if you're talking to a coat I'm wearing.

These are thoughts that come to you while you spend however long you spend holding ice-packs to your eye, or tilting your head back against the wall to try to do something about the way your nose is bleeding, letting your mind work on the question: What reasons might somebody have for leaving her kid in the care of a man like Frank Novak?

Very few people can watch others endure humiliation without recognizing the part they play in increasing it.

It was hard to keep a straight face, but Harriet didn't laugh. Everybody around her was living out a different story in which events had different causes and motivations according to how they were perceived.

Harriet read more voraciously than Simon and Margot ever had. They discouraged this; she'd be so bored once she ran out of texts that were new to her. She surprised them with the discovery that once an avid reader runs out of books, she reads people. Harriet read everybody she met, and when she met them again, she reread them.

I think they must have recognized something in each other, some poorly concealed intensity that other people find nerve-racking.

If you've...got someone within ten minutes' walk who can make you laugh and someone else within a five-minute walk who can help you mourn, you're a millionaire.

It is important to stress the ways that people are different from each other, because so much of the suffering that we experience in our relationships with other people is caused by the fact that we are blind to their point of view.

affection by trying to make things happen for the others. This puts a Giver in the uncomfortable position of having to receive. It may feel like the Eight is dominating even

Waking up to the suffering of people who are different from us is a long process, and has a whole lot to do with what community we belong to and whose consciousness and life experiences impact our own on a daily basis. I have a hunch I'm going to be waking up till the moment I die.