Quotes About Empathy

That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.

From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,' Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, 'I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself.' 'Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising.

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.

The drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.

It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

If I'm hanging out with you, I can't even tell whether I like you or not because I'm too worried about whether you like me.

You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.

Surely we all dealt with and reconciled ourselves to a life many of whose features were out of our control. It was part of living in a world full of other people with other interests.

I guess a bit part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves.

That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.

The doctor gazed at her with a patience she was meant to see.

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention ad awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways every day.

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt.

true decency was very different from pathological generosity, because pathological generosity did not take into account the feelings of the people who were the object of the generosity?

The fact is that we're all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it's almost a cliché.

I think serious art is supposed to make us confront things that are difficult in ourselves and in the world.

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone.

For me, art that's alive and urgent is about what it is to be a human being.

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

A big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves … I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it.

Ma poi si arriva al punto che... cioè, se quella persona arrivi ad amarla, allora è come se la faccenda si capovolgesse. Cioè non è più che apprezzi quella persona per via di certi aspetti di quella persona; piuttosto è che cominci ad apprezzare gli aspetti di quella persona perché apprezzi la persona. Tipo come una cosa centrifuga anziché centripeta.