Quotes About Empathy

I sat him down the other night and explained as gently as possible that I do not care about ice-skating. I do not care about Michelle Kwan or Tara Lipinski and would be happy if I never hear the words triple lutz or double axel again. I told him that on Friday and walked into the kitchen an hour later to find him in tears. "It's heartbreaking," he said, watching his beloved skaters.

July 7, 1995 New York Someone stopped Mitch on the street last night and said, "I need another seventy-five cents so I can buy a cheeseburger. How about helping me?" Mitch said, "Get it without the cheese," and continued walking

I wouldn't know it until months later, but my father had kicked me out of the house not because I was a bum but because I was gay.

I often see people on the streets dressed as objects and handing out leaflets. I tend to avoid leaflets but it breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco. So, if there is a costume involved, I tend not only to accept the leaflet, but to accept it graciously, saying, "Thank you so much," and thinking, You poor, pathetic son of a bitch. I don't know what you have but I hope I never catch it.

Doesn't the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

You're afraid of moths?" He nodded yes and winced a little. "But nobody's afraid of moths." "I am," he whispered, and he looked behind us, as if afraid that one might be listening.

I pulled back because I am not a hugger. Never have been. When someone wraps their arms around me, I shut down and stand there with my eyes closed, waiting for it to be over.

I can see him doing the same thing I am, trying to make some sort of connection. We're like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other's hands and missing every time.

There's a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus "Leave me the fuck alone" comes out as "Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point." This

When I bleat here on page seventeen, do you want me to just bleat or to really let go and 'bleat, bleat'? " I asked. "I feel like 'bleat, bleating,' but if Mother/Destroyer is going to be crawling through the birth canal of concertina wire, I don't want to steal focus, you know what I mean?" He did. That was the scary part, that someone understood me.

When I saw myself through my parents' eyes, I saw a worm crawling through mud and shit toward a psychedelic mushroom, but when I saw myself through hers, I felt that things were possibly not as bad as they seemed.

people aren't foolish as much as they are kind.

It is not unpleasant to hold someone else's warm teeth in your hand...

he's very good to old people, a group that in the not-too-distant future will include me.

In the end I decided the word was more about him than it was about me. But isn't it often that way?

There was nothing wrong with being simply, completely human.

A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

I'm interested in knowing the secrets that connect human beings. At the very deepest level, all our secrets are the same.

I began experimenting with visualizing the rising sun coming up in people's chests as I talked with them. It began to transform my listening.

Give children a chance to love the earth before we ask them to save it.

She'd started noticing how the bodies didn't seem so bad anymore. Dead, not talking, not posing any threat, they kind of grew on her in a way the living never had.

Se equivoca; las mujeres necesitamos otra información sobre un hombre como ése. No conocemos la calidez de su voz, si conversa mirando a los ojos, si su abrazo nos hace sentir pequeñas. A una mujer no le interesa un hombre que necesita ser rescatado. Como empleado, tal vez, concluye, pero para amar a un hombre, el alma buena es lo de menos.

Era un desatino que luego de un bombardeo me llevaran cadáveres de tuberculosos o de alguien que rodó por las escaleras o de un viejo que no pudo más con su vejez o de una mujer que se quedó en el parto; eran muertos de segundo orden, pues no llevaban la aureola de víctimas, sino de meros impertinentes.

Descubrí que los amigos nunca se apenan del todo en tu desgracia, porque les ofrece la más hermosa oportunidad para demostrate cuánto les importas, cuánto se preocupan por ti, cuán geneerosa es su disposición.