empathy

No one's ever sat me down and taught me what empathy is or why it matters more than power or patriotism or religious faith. But I learn it right there in the hallway: I cannot do what's been done to me.

Sex is a metaphor for everything else and everything is a metaphor for sex as well. Because sex is a coming together of two weather patterns, two separate countries, two entities in a conscious state of potentially blissful crisis. Or chaos, or harmony. You__e not quite sure what__ going to happen, but it is the most catastrophic, exciting, and weakening thing that can happen to us. If we are personally involved in it, every fiber of our being is made self-conscious, or is encourages to unify on some level with others. We are delicate. We bring our damage to sexuality, we bring our hopes, we bring our self-image, we bring our world-image, we bring what we believe we are/what we believe we aren__, our blind spots, our prejudices, our sadness. Everything comes out. A lot of people are left wanting, and confusing, and having the idea that their body is like an unloved apartment building; it__ up for grabs and it__ of absolutely no worth. If we feel that way about ourselves and if we feel that way about others, then of course, sex is nothing more than a lot of rubbing and some kind of release. But the more we are, the more we can feel, the more we can empathize, the more human we are.

The women ranged in age, but they were all old enough to know that in the currency of friendship, empathy is more valuable than accuracy.

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she__ taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, __'m sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel._ It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. __o we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it?

Am I sitting here now, months later, in Los Angeles, writing all this down, because I want my life to matter? Maybe so. But I don't want it to matter more than others. I want to remember, or to learn, how to live as if it matters, as if they all matter, even if they don't.

Something was wrong, and while Mr. Bones could scarcely imagine what that thing was, Henry's sadness was beginning to have an effect on him, and within a matter of minutes he had taken on the boy's sadness as his own. Such is the was with dogs.

Since I was a small girl, I have lived inside this cottage, shelted by its roof and walls. I have known of people suffering__ have not been blind to them in the way that privilege allows, the way my own husband and now my daughter are blind. It is a statement of fact and not a judgement to say Charlie and Ella__ minds aren__ oriented in that direction; in a way, it absolves them, whereas the unlucky have knocked on the door of my consciousness, they have emerged from the forest and knocked many times over the course of my life, and I have only occasionally allowed them entry. I__e done more than nothing and much less than I could have. I have laid inside, beneath a quilt on a comfortable couch, in a kind of reverie, and when I heard the unlucky outside my cottage, sometimes I passed them coins or scraps of food, and sometimes I ignored them altogether; if I ignored them, they had no choice but to walk back into the woods, and when they grew weak or got lost or were circled by wolves, I pretended I couldn__ hear them calling my name.

I noticed that religion gave some people a way to escape dealing with the world: __hings will be better when you die,_ the people of my grandma__ generation said as they worked themselves to death. __od wants you to forgive and love those who do you wrong,_ some people said to shake off the shame of being unable to respond to the abuse they endured. The holier-than-thou faction found comfort in believing, __he rest of y__ll are lost because you don__ have a personal relationship with God__ur God._ But art engages you in the world, not just the world around you but the big world, and not just the big world of Tokyo and Sydney and Johannesburg, but the bigger world of ideas and concepts and feelings of history and humanity.

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?

He'd always known that shit rolled downhill, but he never knew tears did the same thing.

It occurred to her that nobody really knew what anybody else was upset about, and that seemed like a terrible thing.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface hidden tension that is already alive

Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...

Remember a Florida judge instructing a jury to focus only on the moment when George Zimmerman and Trayvon Marton interacted, thus transforming a seventeen-year-old, unarmed kid into a big, scary black guy, while the grown man who stalked him through the neighborhood with a loaded gun becomes a victim.

. . . I'm not pretty, not close up anyway. Generally, the closer people get to me the less hot they find me.

His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!