Antonya Nelson Quotes

When I started my hotel company, Joie de Vivre, at the age of 26, I saw this venture as my ticket to freedom.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.

Can a sparrow know how a stork feels?

The character is close to me, except that I haven't lived through those situations, so it's not completely me.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

I hope people who read my books feel empathy for us and really see us as complicated people.

Love stories should be relatable.

You can't have empathy for somebody that's gone through something you haven't - because, definitionally, you can't. But you can feel for them and have sympathy for them. And that's what this country needs to practice more. It's about realizing that you do come from a different place.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I think I'm relatable.

People love to be listened to and represented, and they love it when they feel like you have some of the same problems that they do. Everybody deals with things like romantic difficulties in relationships and death and cancer and abuse.

When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

If after you read something, you connect with it, you want to do it.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

All I want is for people, when they read my books, to feel companioned, to feel they're not alone in the world.

I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?