Quotes About Empathy

she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was.

the feeling I had of moving into somebody else's broken ambition.

Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people.

Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all of the time.

I am fascinated to presume, as a reader, that many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.

I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it. "You

To the suffering person, suffering is solely suffering. It is only for others, as a symbol, that suffering takes on any meaning or purpose. No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.

Back then, we were all still willing to take the "risk," if "risk" is the right word to describe entering into the lives of others, not merely in symbol but in reality.

We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn't feel this way?

He asked questions, he was interested and interesting, he rarely spoke of himself. He had a calm voice for the worst accidents and emergencies.

Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She's not the kind of person who leaves your life when she's in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business...it just goes.

It's a part of what art is here to imagine for us and with us. (I'm a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)

He'd turned to me, red-faced, and asked: 'If we were flying to Europe and you wanted to know what France was like, would it help if I described Germany?

And don't ever underestimate people, don't ever underestimate the pleasure they receive from viewing pain that is not their own, from delivering bad news, watching bombs fall on television, from listening to stifled sobs from the other end of a telephone line. Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.

Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

She was in breach of that feminine law that states that no weakness may be shown by a woman to another woman without a sacrifice of equal value being made in return.

A mortifying sense of porousness.

It dawned on me that he saw me as a sort of child, someone to be treated with kid gloves and presented with reality by degrees.

Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully.

mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case.

Do others have to lose so we can win?

A writer's duty is to register what it is like for him or her to be in the world.

it's a good friend who wakes a friend from her dream

There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion.