Quotes About Empathy

We must all get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something

when you set out in the world to help yourself,sometimes you end up helping Tutti.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. This, in part, is how we become annexes of each other, trellises on which each other's biography can grow.

But whenever I see it happen, I always want to say the same thing. Good luck. Because you still have a woman in front of you, my friend. And you are still a man. It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

Four feet on the ground, a head full of foliage, looking at the world through the heart...

What do you love even more than you love your own ego?

My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else's shadows scared him.

They loved each other, she realized. They loved each other, because they knew each other.

Love over suffering, always.

I would sit with him until he was all right again. I knew that I would sit with him for as long as it took. That's all I could do. That was my only job in the world that day - to sit with a good man. To watch over him from the other side...until he was steadied.

If you really want to get to know someone, you have to divorce him.

It's a pity we cannot put an old head on young shoulders, or you could be wise, too. But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.

You don't need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.

C. S. Lewis, when he wrote of his wife, "We both knew this: I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.

people's judgments about you are none of your business.

I told him. I was not accustomed, Angela, to having men listen to me. And as for your father, he was not accustomed to being with a woman who would walk five miles with him in the middle of the night, in the rain, in Queens, just to keep him company when he could not sleep.

In return, Giovanni told me that empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means 'I have experienced that on my own skin.' Meaning, I have also been burned or scarred in this way, and I know exactly what you're going through.

So be lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.

Nobody could ever be like that bottomless well of a man—that walking confessional booth who could absorb whatever you told him without judgment or alarm. Nobody else could be that beautiful dark soul, who always seemed to straddle the worlds of life and death. Nobody but Frank was Frank

I thought of how many people go to their graves unforgiven and unforgiving. I thought of how many people have had siblings or friends or children or lovers disappear from their lives before precious words of clemency or absolution could be passed along.

He came bearing not a sword but a candle.

people's judgements about you are none of your business

One by one, the thoughts and memories of sadness raised their hands, stood up to identify themselves. I looked at each thought, at each unit of sorrow, and I acknowledged its existence and felt (without trying to protect myself from it) its horrible pain. And then I would tell that sorrow, It's OK. I love you. I accept you. Come into my heart now. It's over....

I could ever tell him about myself that he would judge or criticize. My own glints of darkness did not frighten him; he had such darkness of his own that nobody else's shadows scared him. Most of all, though, he listened.