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Exlpore more Empathy quotes
"Apathy is, too often, a result of overexposure to stressful, highly emotional situations. To rekindle empathy, sometimes we need some space. It's okay to walk away so that you can feel love for someone again. Sometimes for a moment. Sometimes forever."
"How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that is moves me to action?"
"Appreciate youthfulness and empathize with elderly people."
"Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use."
"We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies."
"You didn't get past something like that, you go through it -- and for that reason alone, I understood more about her than she ever would have guessed."
"Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we're taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it's home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, "Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self," but empathy, solidarity, allegiance--the nerves that run out into the world--expand the self beyond its physical bounds."
"When you see someone smile, does it naturally make you want to smile back? When you are irritable, do you find that people mirror your irritability? When someone yawns around you, do automatically do the same? When you hear someone celebrating, do you feel inclined to join in and celebrate too? Your responses are not forced, but instinctual and empathetic."
Explore more quotes by Siri Hustvedt
"There is no reason we should expect young children to enter the nocturnal darkness of sleep and dreams without help."
"It encapsulates so neatly the lesson of expectation and reality that it could serve as a parable. The fact that tomatoes are good is beside the point. If you think you're getting an apple, a tomato will revolt you. That New York should be nicknamed the Big Apple, that an apple is the fruit of humankind's first error and the expulsion from paradise, that America and paradise have been linked and confused ever since Europeans first hit its shores, makes the story reverberate as myth."
"True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded."
"I know, but he must have felt it that way, that evil was an emptiness, a lack of something, not a presence.'He turned his head fast and looked at me. 'That's what desire is, isn't it? The lack of something."
"The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world."
"Transformation of the self are related to where you are, and identity Is dependent on others."
"It appears that time has turned that young woman, who imagined herself a romantic heroine, into something of a comic character, but I remain fond of her. We are relatives, after all."
"Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened."
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