Quotes About Empathy

At one point they'd repeated everything enough, and I wanted to tell them to stop showing the planes hitting the tower. We didn't need to see it again. And yet I didn't turn it off. Because I was hanging on every minute, wanting to be there when whatever was going to happen next actually happened.

I am the people in the other cars, each with his or her own story but passing by too quickly to notice or understand

I wondered if this was how you'd felt. I wondered if I was making myself feel how you'd felt. I knew it wasn't a choice. It was just what my mind was doing. Although I could've been fighting it more.

We often believe the truest measure of a relationship is the ability to lay ourselves bare. But there's something to be said for parading your plumage as well, finding truth as much in the silly as the severe.

The sound of the 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

I never said a bad word about him. The whole time the two of your were together. Not one bad thing.

This is how we understand. We wore your flaws. We wore your fears. We made your mistakes.

I wish she could see how it hits him. The look on his face, his life caving in. Because then maybe she'd realize, if only for a split second, that even though the world doesn't matter to her, she matters to the world.

I'd been hurt, yes—but I'd never meant to become hurtful. I didn't want to close down anyone but myself.

Kindness connects to who you are, niceness connects to how you want to be seen.

I don't remember what book it was - it almost doesn't matter, because the sensation of being read to is so much more powerful than any individual story.

Why is it so much easier to talk to a stranger? Why do we feel we need that disconnect in order to connect?

By losing myself to her, I gain her.

I shed my borrowed life for an hour and put on the borrowed life of the book I'm reading.

Why is it so much easier to talk to a stranger. Why do we feel we need that disconnect to connect?

You don't feel like a stranger to me. I wanted to ask her, What does a stranger feel like? Not to be snarky or sarcastic. Because I really wanted to know if there was a difference, if there was a way to become truly knowable, if there wasn't always something keeping you a stranger, even to the people you weren't strange to at all.

I cried because I am starting to realize that to love someone, to really love them deeply, is to want them to be family.

I'd like to remain at that one delicate remove, so you can get to know me without the distraction of other people's noise.

Elijah, as always, is being unusually kind. While he himself is not lonely, he doesn't mind talking to lonely people. He is the Mother Teresa of banter.

This is the problem with having a barrier between you and everyone else--you see it, but they don't. They talk to you, but you can't talk back to them.

Because we can't stop the weltschmerz, we can't stop imagining the world as it might be. Which is awesome! It is my favorite thing about us!

i think the idea of a 'mental health day' was invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health

You need to love him. I don't care who you thought he was, or who you want him to be, you need to love him exactly as he is because your son is a remarkable human being. You have to understand that.

When people say love is blind, they act like that's a good thing. But some people find their way around in the darkness a little better than others.