35 quotes found
“Freedom from one man is just another one.”
“Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.”
“Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.”
“Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.”
“It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.”
“No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.”
“Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.”
“We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.”
“A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isnt wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being humanand isnt granting ...”
“It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you'd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.”
“Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigr...”
“Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.”
“We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.”
“Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods werent hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ...”
“facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.”
“Empathy isn't just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - it's also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It's made of exertion, tha...”
“Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of em...”
“I didn't enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.”
“Empathy is a kind of care but its not the only kind of care, and its not always enough.”
“Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.”
“We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren't entirely aware we had.”
“I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.”
