Quotes About Empathy

When (The World According To) Garp was published, people who'd lost children wrote to me. ''I lost one, too,'' they told me. I confessed to them that I hadn't lost any children. I'm just a father with a good imagination. In my imagination, I lose my children every day. (afterword)

but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.

Hang in there, Frank!' Freud called - to the entire lobby. 'Don't let anyone tell you you're queer! You're a prince, Frank!' Freud cried. 'You're better than Rudolf!' Freud yelled to Frank. 'You're more majestic than all the Hapsburgs, Frank!' Freud encouraged him. Frank couldn't speak, he was crying so hard.

He wanted to take Homer Wells in his arms, and hug him, and kiss him, but he could only hope that Homer understood how much Dr. Larch's self-esteem was dependent on his self-control.

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world! They should listen to someone else's version of themselves—to anyone else's version! Every country knows more about America than Americans know about themselves! And Americans know absolutely nothing about any other country!

Only the chicken-lover will understand me. He will give me a kindly look, maybe mildly desirous. His eyes will tell me: You might look a lot better with some reddish-brown feathers.

Once again, Jack reached for her hand. It was the only thing he knew how to do. As it would turn out, it was about the only thing he reall knew.

Every time you throw a snail off the dock, Ray teased Homer Wells, you're making someone start his whole life over. Maybe I'm doing him a favor, said Homer Wells, the orphan.

A book feels true when it feels true, she said to him, impatiently. A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.

There were those apres-sex moments when, in a half-asleep or forgetting that I was with a woman, I would reach out and touch her vagina- only to suddenly pull back my hand, as if surprised.

It often happens with grown-ups that their tears are misunderstood. (Who can know which time in their lives they are reliving?)

It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard. Because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans. . . You can't protect people, kiddo, all you can do is love them.

Readers vary, when it comes to having the imagination to enjoy a story outside their own experiences.

Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan's projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion.

Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world!

Ah, well... I started to say, and then stopped. So that was where he was going; I'd heard it before. Richard had told me that I'd not been standing in my mother's shoes in 1942, when I was born; he'd said I couldn't, or shouldn't, judge her. It was my not forgiving her that irked him-it was my intolerance of her intolerance that bugged him.

That's actually happened?' Ruth asked. 'Everything's happened,' the prostitute said.

Don't ever die, Juan Diego had written to Brother Pepe from Iowa City. What Juan Diego meant was that HE would die if he lost Pepe.

As a fourteen-year-old, he'd not been old enough to have sympathy for her—for either the child or the adult that she was.

It's rare when there's something we can do for ourselves which also pleases someone else.

What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats—one day, I was sure, I could "see" everyone who'd been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.

They resembled an elderly, long-married couple—devoted to each other without conversation.

She felt if she ever had children she would love them no less when they were twenty than when they were two; they might need you more at twenty, she thought. What do you really need when you're two? In the hospital, the babies were the easiest patients. The older they got, the more they needed; and the less anyone wanted or loved them.

With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer.