Malorie Blackman Quotes

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.

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

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act - and why.

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.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

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.

Books allow you to see the world through the eyes of others.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious.

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

It's hard to put yourself in someone else's head.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

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.

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

Empathy is the main thing, putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and trying not to judge.

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.

You shouldn't judge someone until you've walk a mile through an underground tunnel in her uncomfortable shoes