Quotes About Empathy

They look up at me and see a rich lady in maternity clothes. They don't realize I am one of them.

You can love a pet more than you love some people. [...] It doesn't matter what it is that leaves a hole inside you. It just matters that it's there.

You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

Don't think you have to discuss the illness. Sometimes, a sick person needs a break. And if you ask up front if he wants to talk about how he feels-- or doesn't-- you're giving him control at a time when he doesn't have a lot of choices.

And I thought—not for the first time—that forgiving and forgetting aren't mutually exclusive.

There are an endless number of people who have left a love-shaped hole in the heart of someone else.

I pulled word after word from my core, like silk for a spider's web, spinning a make-believe life. That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?" - Minka (The Storyteller)

I wonder if it's putting on someone else's skin for a while that she likes so much, or if it's the option of being able to send back a circumstance that just doesn't suit you.

I kept hoping, silently, that you would want to save her like you hadn't been able to save yourself.

Because we're two of a kind. You were made to take care of me, and I'm going to take care of you.

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

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, Reiner. It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

BEING A MOTHER GIVES YOU a singular sort of vision, a prism through which you can see your child with many different faces all at once. It is the reason you can watch him shatter a ceramic lamp, and still remember him as an angel. Or hold him as he cries, but imagine his smile. Or watch him walk toward you, the size of a man, and see the dimpled skin of an infant.

If you want to feel sorry for yourself,then do it in a way that isn't going to destroy other people's lives.

Sometimes all it takes to become human again is someone who can see you that way, no matter how you present on the surface.

Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else. It's something you do for yourself. It's saying, You're not important enough to have a stranglehold on me. It's saying, You don't get to trap me in the past. I am worthy of a future.

The strange thing; her face, after she hit me. She was in greater pain than I. You could see it in her eyes - like she had been violated in some way that broke her own image.

It was easy to be proud of the kid who got straight A's and who made the winning basket-a kid the world already adored. But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated.

My mother and Joe have a lovers' shorthand, an economy of gestures that comes when you are close enough to someone to speak their language. I wonder if my mother and father ever had that, or if my mother was always just trying to decipher him.

It was not compassion that led to Daniel's change of heart, and it was not kindness. It was realizing that, against all odds, he had something in common with Jason Underhill. Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that they we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can't become.

How do you undo intimacy? How do you go back to being acquaintances, when the other person knows every inch and groove of you, every irrational fear, every trigger?

Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been? The

in order to forgive, you have to remember how you were hurt in the first place. And that in order to forget, you had to accept your role in what had happened.

It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn't seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn't, because it was easier that way for both of you.