Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.

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.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

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.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

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

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.

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.

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

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.

To deny someone's feelings or experiences it to literally deny their reality.

I've observed a few things about the few really great people I've had a chance to meet and cover...They need to be around people. You and I require sleep. They require people.

I loved competing and winning and also wanted to continue my career for the fans, knowing they were there for me and enjoyed watching me fight.

I don't believe in God. I believe in man -- in his strength, his possibilities, and his reason.

Sometimes it's harder to play good tennis with a bad tennis player - the same way it's hard to be a good actor with a bad actor. It's just an unpleasant experience.

Progress is impossible without the ability to admit mistakes.

The quickest way to kill jobs is to have this ordinance pass. It is dumb and dangerous.

At Epcot Center the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world.

I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

My Lord, it is a very hard sentence. For my part, I am the innocentest person of them all, only I have been sworn against by perjured persons.