Kelley Armstrong Quotes

No one really understands the grief or joy of another.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

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.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.

Each of us really understands in others only those feelings he is capable of producing himself.

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men.

You can disagree with another person's opinions. You can disagree with their doctrines. You can't disagree with their experience.

In order to get inside their skin, I have to identify with them. That includes even the ones who are complete bastards, nasty, twisted, deeply flawed human beings with serious psychological problems. Even them. When I get inside their skin and look out through their eyes, I have to feel a certain - if not sympathy, certainly empathy for them. I have to try to perceive the world as they do, and that creates a certain amount of affection.

To see with the eyes of another, to hear with the ears of another, to feel with the heart of another. For the time being, this seems to me an admissible definition of what we call social feeling.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

The facts of another's life do not illumine. Only when we know the heart can we know that life. Only the feeling that made the days can light them.

When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.

Imagination has to do with one's awareness of the reality of other people as well as of one's own reality. Imagination is a bridge between the provincialism of the self and the great world.

even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.

No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.

You had to endure something yourself before it touched you.

Too often we judge people based on our own backgrounds and experiences, but when you understand people's stories, it's easier to understand their demeanor.

If you have the power to see things through somebody else's eyes, it's like going from black and white to color or two dimensions to three dimensions.

The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place.

There is so much to be learned from listening to people's hopes, frustrations, and points of view

Reading can almost be viewed as empathy training. Movies have better action scenes, sure. But books are uniquely suited to showing you the inside of another person's head. That is the root of empathy. That's the first step to understanding you're not alone in the world.

You think the only people who are people, are the people who look and think like you. But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger, you'll learn things you never knew you never knew.