Quotes About Empathy

You give her all your french fries, even when she won't give you back onion rings,' Sophie says. 'And when you say her name it sounds different.' How?' Sophie thinks. 'Like it's covered with blankets.

This is what it means to be human. We are all just canvases for our scars.

It still hurts, she whispered. Even when you're doing it for someone else, that doesn't stop your ribs from getting cracked, or your wrist swelling, or your cuts from bleeding.

the universe wants from us is two things: don't do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy.

It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing. It's more important to be there than to be right.

But there's a part of me that wonders what it would be like to be the most important person to someone else, to always feel like you were missing a piece of yourself when he wasn't near you.

You'd think someone who'd been to medical school would be able to hear through a stethoscope that somebody was empty inside.

When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a toddler. What I wanted to say to you, but didn't, was this: Don't use me as your model. I'm the last person you should look up to.

Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

Don't pay back in kind, pay back in kindness. If someone does wrong by you, do right by them.

Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.

It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.

After all, the only way to communicate is to find someone who can comprehend; the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive.

Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?

There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else. Eventually someone brave and stupid will come along and try to fill that hole. But it never works, and so instead, that selfless soul winds up with a gap in his heart, too. And so on. It's a miracle that anyone survives, when so much of us is missing.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn't that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn't that desperation make you human again?

When you're a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to claim.

My mother walks forward. She's crying, but there's a smile on her face. For God's sake, is it any wonder I can't ever understand what you people are feeling?

When you are attracted to people, it's because of the details. Their kindness. Their eyes. The fact that they can get you to laugh when you need it the most.

I tell them that there is nothing more selfish than trying to change someone's mind because they don't think like you. Just because something is different does not mean it should not be respected.

If you want to know someone's story, they have to tell it aloud. But every time, the telling is a little but different. It's new, even to me.

He gently touched his mother's cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips.

I leaned forward and kissed him. And again. As if I were passing him all those silent words I cound not say, the ones that explained my biggest secret: that I might not have OI but I knew how he (Adam) felt. That I was breaking apart, too, all the time.-Amelia