Quotes About Empathy

Most women like to fuss around a wound of your past, pick at the thin scab, comfort you after they'd made it sting. Not Nell.

The air between us crackles, as it does when you speak of your beloved dead. But it's hard to know what to say next.

I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she's inside me, and there's no difference between us or that the difference doesn't matter. I think it is all that love. All that love has to go somewhere.

She stared at me and nodded into the silence between us, as if I were still talking and making perfect sense.

It's good to get whacked open at least once, though,' she says. 'You can't really love from inside a big, thick shell.

Who are we and were are we going? Why are we, with all our "progress" so limited in understanding and sympathy and the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

I try to write something new. It's bad and I stop after a few sentences. Even though I didn't feel it at the time, I got into a rhythm with the old novel. I knew those characters and how to write them. I heard their voices and I saw their gestures and anything else feels fake and stiff. I ache for them, people I also once felt were stiff and fake, but who now seem like the only people I could ever write about.

He seems genuinely happy for me. You can't always count on a guy for that.

This was the way it was with Marc. His heart had a narrow field of vision. I knew it held a great many things, but the aperture was small and I had to wait my turn to be rotated back around into the light where I would glow so brightly I'd be all he could see.

I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall.

squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

He listens. He breathes into the phone. I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

She wraps an arm around me and pulls me in tight. 'I know how you feel. You know I do. It's good to get whacked open at least once, though,' she says. 'You can't really love from inside a big thick shell.

You don't always see how much other people are shaping you.

talking about characters in books is exciting and soothing to me at the same time.

I think about how you get trained early on as woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall. Your words go scattershot off of it.

You get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that's hard to unravel.

For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear.

particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

How does a man in Mississippi in the 1920s create a character who feels more alive to a waitress in 1997, remembered with more tenderness, than most of the boys she's ever known? How do you create a character like that?

Did he know? Of course he didn't. But for so long now when someone asked how she was they loaded it with pity and braced themselves for her reply, as if she had the power to hurt them with the truth.

Oh sweetie.' He hugs me hard. 'It's okay. It's gonna be okay.' It's so much easier to cry when there are arms around you.