Quotes About Empathy

You need to remember that, Jean-Guy. The blindness you mention isn't believing in the essential goodness of people, it's failing to see it.

She suspected if they looked in Gamache's bedside table, they'd find all sorts of lost souls he put there for safekeeping. And maybe a baguette.

Anyone could be clever. Anyone could be smart. Anyone could be taught. But not everyone was kind." Chapter 1 · Page 10 · Location 202

A therapist has to have clear boundaries, even with former clients. People already get into our heads—if they also get into our lives, there's a problem.

When a woman commits to something she does it with both her heart and her head. Very powerful.

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth for the other. Now there is no more loneliness.

People instinctively let down their guard when they saw a limp, an illness, a flaw in someone else. Not out of compassion but because it made them feel superior. Stronger. Those people, Gamache knew, did not always last long. It was not a useful instinct.

he'd come to agree with Sister Prejean that no one was as bad as the worst thing they'd done.

Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth for the other.

Having a friend, Chief Inspector. All you need is one. Makes all the difference.

Kindness beats cruelty.

But never, ever mistake kindness for weakness.

Ruth lost her footing. Haniya grabbed her before she fell. She held Ruth's hand for the rest of the way, and wondered if maybe the key was not in being held, but in holding.

I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn't that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.

Some might argue that Three Pines itself isn't real, and they'd be right, but limited in their view. The village does not exist, physically. But I think of it as existing in ways that are far more important and powerful. Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.

They'd crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn't. Colors bled pale. Music was just notes. Books no longer transported or comforted, not fully. Never again. Food was nutrition, little more. Breaths were sighs. And they knew something the rest didn't. They knew how lucky the rest of the world was.

It's important, Madeleine, not to cut people out of our lives. Isolation doesn't make us better at our job. It makes us weaker, more vulnerable.

Though dour and childless himself, the grocer was unfailingly kind and patient with children. As though instead of having none, he had them all.

You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?" Myrna

The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn't totally foreign to him. He knew it because he'd seen his own burned terrain, he'd walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. And one day Jean Guy Beauvoir would look at his own monsters, and then be able to recognize others. And maybe this was the day and this was the case. He hoped so.

But being essentially a dumpster fire herself, she was familiar with flames.

He listened to people, took notes, gathered evidence, like all his colleagues. But he did one more thing. He gathered feelings. He collected emotions. Because murder was deeply human.

That was why she was happy. He now knew that happiness ad kindness went together. There was not one without the other. For Jean-Guy it was a struggle. For Annie it seemed natural.

Armand Gamache was never more glad he'd married this woman, who made his battles theirs.