#empathy

Children who find a single important life in the ordinary, unimportant, and unheroic are less likely to succumb to the human fallacy of us versus them. ↗

— Betty Levin Betty Levin ("Polar Bears and Lemmings

#life

When my sister was released from the mental hospital, she came to live with me in the tilting and crumbling one-bedroom house I'd bought with the small amount of money I inherited when our parents died. She arrived one afternoon unannounced in a taxi. She must have known instinctively that I'd take her in. I don't know how or why they released her. Probably due to overcrowding, and they had her scratch her name on a form then pushed her out the door. Or maybe she just slipped away when no one was looking (who'd notice in a place like that?)--she never did tell me and I didn't ask her. I was so happy to have her with me again that the last thing I wanted to do was break the spell by letting reality intrude. Ever since they'd dragged her away weeping with laughter and reaching out for me with our parents' blood still coating her hands with shiny red gloves, I'd felt amputated, like they'd pulled her kicking and screaming and insane out of my guts. ↗

— Michael Gira

#money

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. ↗

— James Baldwin

#empathy #pain #reading #people

Too many people are endowed with a feeling of entitlement, but born without God-given empathy. ↗

— C. JoyBell C.

#pitfalls-of-the-human-race #truth-quotes #wisdom-quotes #empathy

It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep. ↗

— Lydia Millet

#empathy

I grew up with lots of animals and I related more to them than I did to people. I feel a lot of empathy for them. ↗

— Neko Case

#empathy #feel #grew #i #i feel

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive. ↗

— Ralph Fiennes

#alive #aphrodisiac #completely #detached #devil

Although I'm not particularly troubled myself, I do have a lot of empathy for troubled characters. ↗

— Mia Wasikowska

#characters #empathy #i #i do #lot

The struggle of my life created empathy - I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me. ↗

— Oprah Winfrey

#being #could #created #empathy #having

Sweet Evelyn, I think, I should have loved you better. Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above him as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he had yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid's mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son's hand. I see the pain I've caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam's body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone. ↗

— George Saunders

#compassion #empathy #forgiveness #hatred #change