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"Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over."
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"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."

"Appreciate youthfulness and empathize with elderly people."

"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."

"If you see a person who is suffering from misery and sadness, wash it away with your compassion and kindness."
Explore more quotes by Neil Gaiman

"In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything."

"I don't think that I've been in love as suchAlthough I liked a few folk pretty wellLove must be vaster than my smiles or touchfor brave men died and empires rose and fellFor love, girls follow boys to foreign landsand men have followed women into hellIn plays and poems someone understandsthere's something makes us more than blood and boneand more than biological demands For me love's like the wind, unseen, unknownI see the trees are bending where it's beenI know that it leaves wreckage where it's blownI really don't know what "I love you" meansI think it means "don't leave me here alone."

"I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind."

"The marquis stared at Richard, openly amused. "What a refreshing mind you have, young man," he said. "There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?"

"We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams into words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable."

"We all have so many functions, so many ways of existing. In my own vision of myself, I am a scholar who lives quietly, and pens his little tales, and dreams about a past that may or may not have existed. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I am also, in one of my capacities, like so many of the people you have chosen to associate with, a psychopomp. I escort the living to the world of the dead."

"The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself."

"Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open."
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