Quotes About Empathy

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners

there are few things harder to imagine than other people's conversations about yourself.

It's good to have friends in life. If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.

Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.

Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with it.

Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That's what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that's kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn't.

You can think of me thinking of you, because that's what I'll be doing whenever you think of me.

It was clear to everyone that day, and in the months that followed, that Patty's greatest warming influence was on Walter himself. Now, instead of speeding by his neighbors in his angry Prius, he stopped to lower his window and say hello. On weekends, he brought Patty over to the patch of clear ice that the neighborhood kids maintained for hockey and instructed her in skating, which, in a remarkably short time, she became rather good at.

I said it was OK, I said I loved her, I said not to worry about me. Her breathing became slower and more labored, and then just past noon, it stopped altogether. I laid my cheek on her chest and held her for a long time, not thinking anything, just being an animal that had lost its mother.

Essay's roots are in literature, and literature at its best invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.

The world was overpopulated with talkers and underpopulated by listeners, and many of her sources gave her the impression that she was the first person who'd ever truly listened to them.

He cried for a long time. I stroked his head and held him close. If he'd been a woman, I would have kissed his hair. But strict limits to intimacy are straight man's burden.

An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.

the novel is a liberal form…and the act of fiction writing is a performance of sympathy with people you are not .

To love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he's lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them.

But what you are saying now, the way you're speaking to me - there's a level to this that I never saw when you were in the group. A level of honesty, vulnerability. If you could have opened yourself up like this even once… It's kind of amazing to see it now.

it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids' response to her.

She seemed more pitiable than murderable.

theoretically sorry

Not only had Mr. Butcavage's questions been reasonable, he also had an unfortunate name and no friends in his neighborhood. He was probably a lonely person like her mother, and Pip felt helplessly compassionate toward anyone who reminded her of her mother.

Ma ora si rendeva conto che quello, come tradimento, era così piccolo che faceva ridere. Così piccolo che faceva piangere.

you shouldn't try to save a drowning woman unless you were ready to drown yourself