Quotes About Empathy

It's not the easy things that let you get to know a person. Know, and love.

The had compatible silences.

no matter how hard it was to understand, she would be on my side. Fiercely. Unconditionally.

crave, v.: Nothing makes me feel as welcome in the world as the sound of you laughing at a joke I've made.

Yes, our situations are different. But we're both human, and that means we both have the nearly infinite potential to mess things up, and need a nearly infinite amount of patience and grace in order to be the people we should be.

Terwijl Vics ouders het niet konden laten hem te zien zoals hij vroeger was, en veel vrienden en ook vreemden iemand zagen die hij niet meer wilde zijn, zag Dawn alleen hem. Misschien was het beeld wazig, maar Dawn zag alles heel helder. Zij zag duidelijk en ondubbelzinnig een persoon.

Life is so hard. I see it everywhere. I see the homeless people on the street. I see how tragically humans have hurt the earth. How terribly they hurt each other. I also know how lucky I was. I would take my privilege for granted.

We remember what it was like to meet someone new. We remember what it was like to grant someone possibility. You look out from your own world and then you step into his, not really knowing what you'll find there, but hoping it will be something good.

The sound of words as they're said is always different from the sound they make when they're heard, because the speaker hears some of the sound from the inside.

If she'd been bleeding in the street, you would've run to get help. It's the same thing! Typical, I could hear you saying back. The whole point is that I wasn't bleeding in the street . I wasn't dying of cancer. You couldn't take an X-ray and see what was wrngsithme. You couldn't make such an easy diagnosis. You had to guess. And everybody guessed wrong. But the things is, I hadn't even made the guess. I trusted that you knew what you were doing. You were very convincing. And I destroyed you.

I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had.

He didn't want to say Let's just be friends or I hope we can stay friends, because that made friendship sound like a consolation prize, the blue ribbon to look at distractedly while someone else walks off with the gold cup. No, what he said was: I think you and I will be even closer, and that we will be even better together and more to each other if we're best friends, not boyfriends.

It is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings. It's a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.

It's been said of me that I know how to love well, if any person alive can possess such knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us. It is all such a blessing—in the beginning, and the end, and the during.

I could relate to Miss Lucy because her life made absolutely no sense.

I said I hated life. You said you hated life. We decided to hate it together.

You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation mid-sentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.

Ik wil dat ze kon zien hoe geslagen hij is. De uitdrukking op zijn gezicht, zijn leven staat op instorten. Want dan zou ze misschien beseffen, al het was het maar een fractie van een seconde, dat hoewel de wereld haar niet interesseert, de wereld wel geïnteresseerd is in haar.

Now I know: Love isn't so straightforward. It's never a matter of telling yourself to do it and doing it. It's never a matter of someone else telling you to do it and doing it. It can't exist between two people if they can't also feel it exist outside of them, too. It can involve hurt, but it shouldn't make you hurt all the time. Then it's not love. It's a trap disguised as love. -Rhiannon

It's one thing to fall in love. It's another to feel someone else falling with you...

What a strange phrase - not seeing other people. As if it's been constructed to be a lie. We see other people all the time. The question is what we do about it.

I remind myself that I don't need to know everything, that there will always be essential rooms within us that will be unknown. I loosen my idea of him, and he becomes recognisable again.

Wherever she is, whatever she's doing – it's not about you. It's about her. And you have to let it be about her. Sometimes we don't want to be found right away. If we step away, it's because we need to be found on our own terms.

One of the towers has fallen. When it's our turn to leave, it's like something in me is finally willing to listen, and suddenly I understand what it means. The tower doesn't exist anymore. Something I've seen my entire life - something so much larger than my entire life - is gone. That is my first reaction. And then I think about all the people inside. There must have been people inside.