Anthony Marra Quotes

Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household.

I don't understand why people really get upset about something that doesn't affect them at all.

You can have immediate regrets, but if you look at stuff and say, 'Things happen for a reason', there's a fatalistic thing about it. Something will happen that will justify it in some way.

These funerals always appear to me the more indecent in a populous city, from the total indifference of the beholders, and the perfect unconcern with which they are beheld.

So many people witness atrocities and can't take their eyes away from them, but that doesn't mean they're good.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

It's indifference and ignorance that stops people from doing the right thing.

There is so much indifference in the face of suffering. May we overcome indifference with concrete acts of charity.

Our consciences take no notice of pain inflicted on others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us.

Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own.

I would not despair unless I knew the irrevocable decree was passed; saw my misfortune recorded in the book of fate, and signed and sealed by neces-sity.

It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering

I wouldn't like to make anybody cry, I don't dislike anybody. It doesn't even matter - the opponent is always faceless.

Pity those who don't feel anything at all

Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

Teach us to care and not to care

A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

I don't really get scared. Want to know what else i don't feel?" PITY

How often, in this cold and bitter world, is the warm heart thrown back upon itself! Cold, careless, are we of another's grief; we wrap ourselves in sullen selfishness.

[S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.

How long can you hear someone crying - how long can you hear someone dying - before you ask yourself why?

It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me.

When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do towards other humans.