Quotes About Empathy

Now they were gathering because the world was unbearable, and they themselves were not.

You had to train your mind to remember: human being lying here at my feet, not someone to feel contempt toward.

No one else knew what went on inside you; no one else cared.

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. 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.

People wanted one another to do something. They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else.

Joe once told me he felt a little sorry for women, who only got husbands. Husbands tried to help by giving answers, being logical, stubbornly applying force as though it were a glue gun. Or else they didn't try to help at all, for they were somewhere else entirely, out walking in the world by themselves. But wives, oh wives, when they weren't being bitter or melancholy or counting the beads on their abacus of disappointment, they could take care of you with delicate and effortless ease.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you'd always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely?

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you.

Jules had had five sessions with a disheveled social worker named Melinda, who was as kind as the kindest mother, nodding in sympathy while Jules railed against the stupidity of college life. Later, she would barely remember what Melinda had said to her, but at the time her presence had been soothing and necessary,

Will you be okay? I do not mean in a cosmic sense.

They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else. A word might land in a certain way; or maybe not even a word. Maybe a gesture, or a moment of listening.

strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit

Most of the time I'm like, 'Why do I have to share a gender with you, you piece of shit?' It's like when you have a bad relative who has the same last name.

it was always slightly off when everyone was in a couple except for one person. the entire group tended to single that person out, as if to try and make him feel better in his aloneness, as though it were an unnatural state.

To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life.

Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control it all.

I picture him always like he's looking at us through glass—windshields, sliding patio doors.

He'd tried to explain it to her, how accidents happen but we really are safe. But there was, already, the sense that nothing he said touched what was really bothering her, which was the realization that you can't stop bad things from happening to other people, other things. And that would be hard forever. He'd never quite gotten used to it himself.

But I would never tell anyone that," Dr Severin adds, leaning forward once more. She smiles ruefully. "You can never tell a man or he'll think, Ah! That's what driver her. And that's a way to weaken her.

I have another friend who gets what I'm really like, and I get her. She scares me. Did you ever see yourself times ten in another person and want to cover your eyes?

I think she might cry. In her way, she is.

When you have nothing inside you, you feel everything more, and feel you can control all of it.

we despise most those who know us at our worst. It's true. It's so true.