Quotes About Empathy

We are most reluctant to hurt those who remind us of ourselves.

And Moose heard her happiness then—Oh, the joy that came of dispensing happiness to others, of entering happiness's interlocking circuitry!

A good deed needs no excuse.

One horror of motherhood lies in the moments when she can see both the exquisiteness of her child and his utter inconsequence to others. There are so many boys in the world.

A good deed needs no excuse. So his pop used to reassure Dexter when he would resist, embarrassed, carrying a covered dish of leftover meatballs to the bums and hoboes who haunted the carny houses near his restaurant. Dexter muttered the phrase to himself as he lifted the heavy folded chair into his trunk. A good deed needs no excuse.

Agnes felt her daughter's impatience that she go, and it made her want to cleave, as if holding Anna would somehow awaken in her daughter the need to be held. Agnes clasped her fiercely, trying through sheer force to open the folded part of Anna, so deeply recessed.

Anna liked Bascombe, which was partly to say that she liked herself in his company.

You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I believe in you and I'll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!

Even smiling, there's no hope for Marty's face. But I'm worried he might think the same of me, so I don't smile back.

Maybe we shared an impatience with small talk, being a heart surgeon and a drug counselor. The body and its needs: the thing itself.

Later, in bed, she smooths my forehead with her cool hand. "He's had a hard time, Drew," she says. "Is it too much to ask you to be patient with him?" "He's not our son. I don't know him, and neither do you." "He's family," she says. "Isn't that enough?

You will never know how much I understand you.

Your throat tightens up and your eyes get wet as you watch their faces go from stony to sad, and it's all kind of moving and sweet except that you're not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, they'll forgive you, they won't desert you, and the question is, which one is really "you," the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?

She was not unique, but neither was she alone. Reading might have saved her.

You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life , until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!

If I could imagine the past with compassion, why couldn't I breathe hope into an imagined future?

Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved?

But there were times when I remembered my younger self the way you'd remember a dear friend you'd lost, for reasons you no longer quite understood.

If you've never experienced a sense of dysphoria with your own body, all I can say is, Lucky you. But just because you have not experienced this yourself does not mean it is not real in the hearts of others.

I learned the terrible truth that as we morph from self to self over time, the love that one self has sworn can seem unfathomable to another.

Maybe we should just love one another, even if we don't completely understand the things that people bear in their dark, strange hearts, even if the stars that other men and women are following seem invisible to us. If we make ourselves open to the humanity of others first, maybe understanding will follow. An incomprehensible theory of the universal isn't necessary if your only ambition is to embrace another soul. What you need, maybe all you need, in fact, is the willingness to love.

Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved? Why is it that what is so obvious to dogs is such a mystery to men and women?

There are times when I think it's impossible to know another soul. I don't know, maybe we're lucky that way. If we knew what really went on inside other people's private hearts it would make our eyeballs bleed.

And at every moment as I lived my life, I countered this awareness with an exasperated companion thought, namely, Don't be an idiot. You're not a girl. Get over it. But I never got over it.