Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.
Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.
Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine.
Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.
Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.
'Tough' is one of the last adjectives I would use to describe myself.
No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.
The story of getting better can be just as compelling as the story of falling apart.
Whenever we feel shame, it's a mark of some deep investment or deep internal struggle.
I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to figure out what to say at the dinner table.
Somebody once asked me how I define sobriety, and my response was 'liberation from dependence.'
Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.
I had never really thought of myself as a baby person, but it's just a really profound connection.
Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.
It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.
I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.
Shame doesn't exist as an emotion without the projected or perceived sense of judgment coming from somewhere else.
When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.
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.
It's kind of funny that I've been branded as the empathy lady when, really, what I'm doing is questioning and interrogating empathy.
I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.
Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.
I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.
The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.
My dad is an economist who does global development research. What he practices is a kind of quantifiable empathy: trying to empathize with systems rather than people.
I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings.
Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting to feel completely singular and unique.
I do like arranging things. I like order. I basically like all these things that are the opposite of what people associate with the wild, passionate creative temperament.
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.
The 'here' of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. 'Here' is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf.
I used to believe that hurting would make you more alive to the hurting of others. I used to believe in feeling bad because somebody else did. Now I'm not so sure of either.
12-step recovery is very focused on abstinence, and that's bled into the broader understanding of treatment. It would be most useful to have multiple senses of what treatment could look like.
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.
I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.
It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.
If you operate under the premise that everybody already has some experiences that could be sources of empathy for them, I wonder if there's some process of coaxing people into tapping into that knowledge.
Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.
I really believe in people putting stories out there that contain the most difficult moments because nothing to me is more lonely making than sanitized stories or airbrushed stories that kind of allied how hard it got.
I completely identify with finding freedom in boundaries. That's why I tend to have more freedom when I write nonfiction over fiction: because I'm running up against actuality and beholden to the truth in a different way.
When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.
In my own life as a reader I experience real moments of alienation when a writer feels too perfect, or like even the flaws they are admitting are somehow noble, or dysfunctional in an overly edgy, aesthetically pleasing way.
When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.
Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
I don't make films, and because I don't make films, I'm not an expert in the craft of bringing a film into the world, how you put its various pieces together. But where I feel like I'm an expert is my own feelings in response to a film.
You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.
I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally - that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then - if you're hard on yourself, in good ways - pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale.
The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
There's something about that puritanical narrative of progress and upward mobility and work ethic that the glorification of abstinence fits pretty neatly into. That pairs with the fact that 12-step recovery has had too large a monopoly on how treatment is understood in America.
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.