Deborah Harkness Quotes

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

A good teacher must be able to put himself in the place of those who find learning hard.

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

My trademark at CNN was really asking insightful questions and making sure people are understanding the connections in humanity, and I think that is the core of education.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

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

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

I love being around kids; they're honest and refreshing, and I love teaching them new things.

Those who care, teach. Those who love, teach. Those who can, teach.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

We come to love not by finding a perfect person but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.

When I was at school, one of my teachers had two statements hanging from the board all year: 'Be observant' and 'Be empathetic.'

Teach love, generosity, good manners and some of that will drift from the classroom to the home and who knows, the children will be educating the parents.

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.

Condemn none: if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brothers, and let them go their own way.

As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Journalism allows its readers to witness history; fiction gives its readers an opportunity to live it.

We have to realize only in communication, in real knowledge, in real reaching out, can there be an understanding that there's humanity everywhere, and that's what I'm trying to do.