Edwidge Danticat Quotes

… people never become a mass, they remain entities, and so you are able to feel human suffering and make others feel it because it is represented to you by individuals

Can I see another's woe, And not be in sorrow too? Can I see another's grief, And not seek for kind relief? Can I see a falling tear, And not feel my sorrow's share? Can a father see his child Weep, nor be with sorrow filled? Can a mother sit and hear An infant groan, an infant fear? No, no! never can it be! Never, never can it be!

I'm constantly on the brink of tears in conversation about things that happen to people.

Acting is, to me now, artificial. Seeing people suffer is real. It couldn't be more real. Some people don't like to look at it in the face because it's painful. But if nobody does, then nothing gets done.

Humans feel deeply the suffering of their friends and allies and easily discount/dismiss the comparable experience of their enemies.

It is only possible through the fact that sympathy for the general life and suffering of mankind is very weakly developed in the individual.

The misery of other people is only an abstraction something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.

To each his suff'rings: all are men, / Condemn'd alike to groan, / The tender for another's pain; / Th' unfeeling for his own.

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatesoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.

people are not good to each other. perhaps if they were our deaths would not be so sad.

All human suffering concerns each human being.

Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

Yet tears to human suffering are due; And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown Are mourned by man, and not by man alone.

He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

I spent three and a half years writing the novel 'Chang & Eng,' about the conjoined brothers for whom the term 'Siamese twins' was contrived, and when I think of these afflicted people, my only emotion is one of profound sympathy.

I want 'Flesh Of My Flesh' to be like my connection to the community, I want to say what's on my peoples' minds, soak up all their pain. I've learned that when I take it all in, I can make one brotha's pain be understood by the world.

I'm very, very sensitive to pain and to people who suffer.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.

Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society's ills.