Quotes About Empathy

He studied her upturned face for a minute. "Please forgive me. I don't want you to hope. If there were any way—" "I know." She got to her feet. "I even understand." She walked briskly to the door. "I came down to get something for Rebecca. She must be wondering what happened to me.

Can anyone ever know everything about another person?

Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.

Hay cosas menores, pero aun así muy importantes. No es amable. No sabe cuándo ha de decir algo que consuele y cuándo hay que callar. La historia le importa un pimiento. No tiene ojos grises dulces ni cejas pobladas, ni se sube las mangas hasta los codos. —La miré fijamente, y ahora me miró con valentía decidida—. En suma, el mayor problema de él es que no es tú.

We couldn't be sure of anything except the power of love…and we are under no requirement to believe in a particular source of that love as long as we could keep giving and receiving some in our own lives.

This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.

God sees. God hears. God cares.

How quickly I judge, and therefore diminish their humanity.

Over and over, we are broken on the shore of life. Our stubborn egos are knocked around, and our frightened hearts are broken open—not once, and not in predictable patterns, but in surprising ways and for as long as we live.

Full-hearted fatherhood might save the world.

If all we do is immerse ourselves in the stories of bad people doing bad things to each other and the planet, we will sink under the weight of a lopsided story.

Does that mean you

Grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving.

This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It's what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it's better to say nothing than something clumsy.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

I'm thinking of that Florida lady again, the one who wanted a book about the lighter side of a child's death, and I know: all she wanted was permission to remember her child with pleasure instead of grief. To remember that he was dead, but to remember him without pain: he's dead but of course she still loves him, and that love isn't morbid or bloodstained or unsightly, it doesn't need to be shoved away.

The things that were so bad, that hurt so. If I forget them, if I forget such things still happen, how can I help others? My scars prove that I know myself what others suffer.

it's important not to take offense unless offense is meant.

What do you want for them when they're grown? Surround them with people who are that—the kind of adults you want them to be. Children are such mimics Ã¢â'¬Â¦ if they see honesty and fair dealing and kindness, they will copy that.

I liked laser tag, but when I told her that in the first session she put down "violent tendencies.

I sorrow for your suffering, and I am sorry for my early arrogance, that assumed no one else had also suffered

It's possible to like bad people, but liking them doesn't make them good.

I'm not saying Barra's bad, exactly, but I am saying you think she's good at heart because you like her and want her to be good at heart. It doesn't work that way. If you don't learn to see people as they are, you'll get hurt someday.

Not free of pain, nor free of fear, but free of the need to react to that fear in all the old ways. She had no anger left, no hatred, no desire for vengeance, nothing but pity for those who must find such vile amusements, who had no better hope, or no courage to withdraw.