The Empathy Exams: Essays Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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 immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: W...

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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 extend...

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for an...

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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 empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields...

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

I don't know if what I'm seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they're worms, or whether I want them to be worms or not, or what I have to believe about this woman if they aren't worms, or about the world or human bodies...

The Empathy Exams: Essays

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

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.

The Empathy Exams: Essays

Freedom from one man is just another one.

The Empathy Exams: Essays