Quotes About Empathy

Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around.

Progressive liberals seem incapable of stating the obvious truth: that we who are well off should be willing to share more of what we have with poor people not for the poor people's sake but for our own; i.e., we should share what we have in order to become less narrow and frightened and lonely and self-centered people.

The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.

I don't want to hurt myself. I want to stop hurting.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

It took years after I'd graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I'd been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.

the sun would leave my sky if I couldn't assume you'd simply come and tell me you were sad.

Say the whole point of love is to try to get your fingers through the holes in the lover's mask. To get some kind of hold on the mask, and who cares how you do it.

Describe-the-sort-of-man-you-find-attractive-and-I'll-affect-the-demeanor-of-that-sort-of-man

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

The encaged and suicidal have a really hard time imagining anyone caring passionately about anything.

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.

It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians makes us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.

Hal finds he rather envies a man who feels he has something to explain his being fucked up, parents to blame it on.

But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across this room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich and complicated and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not a good writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.

The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it.

I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is more like confused.

That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak.

the drowned panic of not being able to ask questions or have any input into what somebody's saying is so awful it sort of dwarfs the pain.