Quotes About Empathy

He and Hal exchanged the very slight sorts of nods people use when they like each other past all need for politeness.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely. It's

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

That a person who did something for somebody's gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person.

My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.

There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man.

and he can feel his heart going out into the world...

Capii che gli ubriachi e gli storpi vengono trascinati fuori dall'arena come Cristi disossati, un uomo sotto ogni braccio, coi piedi che strisciano a terra, gli occhi al cielo.

Step into the skin and disappear.

It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

sentence-by-sentence basis—that it's okay if a person

Me imitaba cuando yo estaba molesto -solamente el amor de la vida de uno puede hacer esto- y a mí se me pasaba el enfado

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

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

X secretly castigates himself and wonder where his basic decency and compassion are.

Because it literally makes no sense. Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when this guy's done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of 'Keep Coming!' are so sincere it's almost painful.

right before he'd mailed her child an expensive toy and then had his phone number changed, he'd awakened from a night of horror-show

Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from thousands of serves to no one. Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute. This is the whirlpool, a friend.

We're all terribly, terribly lonely. And there's a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can't be in the real world. — David Foster Wallace, interview in Whiskey Island , Spring, 1993.

And I'll say that I felt something dark in my heart when my husband almost nudged me there. I felt that it was a sorry business indeed when my own spouse couldn't tell I was being serious. And I told him so.

a manual for how to build a mentally ill child

extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I'm lifesick)

There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.