Anna Quindlen Quotes

I would like to see someone walk a mile in my shoes for five minutes.

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.

In any business, the more you learn, the more sympathetic you can be to other people's positions.

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.

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

Learn to see in another's calamity the ills which you should avoid.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

Until you walk a mile in another man's moccasins you can't imagine the smell.

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.

The best strategy for making people care about what happens is if they empathize with both sides. If you just have a Villain with a capital V, it becomes very two-dimensional.

With age comes a greater understanding and a greater worldview.

The adage is true: Walk a mile in my shoes - or drive a mile in my car. There is nothing quite like sitting in the seat yourself.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

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.

Before passing a judgement on somebody just give it a thought about what he or she went through.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

That is the way of youth and life in general: that we do not understand the strategy until after the campaign is over.

Put yourself in the other man's place and then you will know why he thinks certain things and does certain deeds.

I try to consider people's perspectives and not just my own.

Life is hard, and children have to be told how hard life can be…So they will be sympathetic to others. So they will understand that some people have it harder than they do and that a trip through this world can be a wildly different experience, depending on what chemicals are raging through one’s mind.

but you could also look at it the other way. Like you’re saying no matter how bad things are for you, I can still relate.

For me, I think it's such an important thing to hear other people's stories, because you do find ways that either you can learn something from them, or you can identify with something that they've gone through. You realize that maybe what you're going through in life isn't just specific to you, that somebody else understands it, or you talk to someone and all of sudden you see something in a completely different way because of what they've said to you or shared with you.

Can a sparrow know how a stork feels?

The years teach much which the days never know.

Trying to imagine what it's like to be someone else is never a substitute for actually living that way, for acknowledging the respect that we need to have for each other's experiences.