Quotes About Empathy

After a certain age, you felt a need not to be alone. It grew stronger, like a radio frequency, until finally it was so powerful that you were forced to do something about it.

We are all here, on this earth for only one go around. And everyone thinks their purpose is to just find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is to find what other people need.

Even if you yourself were unhappy and anxious, whenever you glimpsed happiness in your child, you suddenly became happy too.

All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the disinterested parents.

Is there anything sadder than the scrawniest little piece of uneaten chicken at a dinner party?" "Hmm," said Jules. "Yes. The Holocaust.

Without company, misery turns to sorrow, and sorrow turns inward, curling up in some dark, damp corner.

Love is when you feel, like, oh, oh, my heart hurts...Or like when you see a dog and you feel like you have to touch its head.

to find out what another human being feels, a person who isn't you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That's what writing is supposed to do.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives.

Greer had understood it was hard to escape yourself, and to escape the way it felt being you.

I'm beginning to think I feel too much. The feelings flood into me like so much water, and I am helpless against the onslaught.

But of course she liked Isadora less now, because she needed her less and saw her more clearly.

Standing in the heat and noise, facing the rows of bent heads, Ethan Figman willed himself to leave that long sleep in which you dream that the inhuman things that people do to one another on a distant continent have nothing to do with the likes of you.

Even when I can't relate on a personal level, she makes me know what she feels, and that's really something. To find out what another human being feels, a person who isn't you; to get a look under the hood, so to speak. A deep look inside. That's what writing is supposed to do.

When women got into positions of power, they calibrated and recalibrated tenderness and strength, modulating and correcting. Power and love didn't often live side by side. If one came in, the other might go.

After all, you could use your outside voice and scream your head off, but sometimes it didn't seem as if the screaming was being heard.

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need. And maybe the world does not actually need to see you,

Everyone tended to believe everything was their fault; maybe it was just hard to imagine, when you were still fairly young, that there were some things in the world that were just not about you .

for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need.

How are any of us in this room supposed to care about anything, when we're constantly being pulled back by unbearable thoughts and feelings?

We are all here on this earth for only one go-round. And everyone thinks their purpose is just to find their passion. But perhaps our purpose is also to find out what other people need. And maybe the world does not actually need to see you, my dear, reciting a tired old monologue from the Samuel French collection or pretending to be drunk and staggering around. Has that ever occurred to you?

Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

I must have no pride whatsoever that I put up with your coldness