imaginative empathy Quotes

To be known so well by someone is an unimaginable gift. But to be imagined so well by someone is even better.

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

Perhaps people ought to feel with more imagination.

I'm not going to experience the reality of hardship that sometimes my characters live in. I'm very cautious about that.

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

The sympathies of a well-adjusted person can easily be aroused by the plight of strangers. Indeed, the skillful writer of a novel, a play, or an opera can engage our emotions on behalf of people who are not only strangers to us, but who do not even exist! And a person whose emotions cannot be so aroused is not behaving normally.

And what is the great thing that the stage does? It cultivates the imagination. And . . . the imagination constitutes the great difference between human beings. . . . The imagination is the mother of pity, the mother of generosity, the mother of every possible virtue. It is by the imagination that you are enabled to put yourself in the place of another.

Love, like the opening of the heavens to the Saints, shows for a moment, even to the dullest man, the possibilities of the human race. He has faith, hope, and charity for another being, perhaps but a creation of his imagination: still it is a great advance for a man to be profoundly loving even in his imaginations.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

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.

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die.

I am not sure how a novel changes the world. I think it alters a reader's perspective by asking him or her to see the world through another consciousness. That can perhaps cause people to see their own lives differently. Or just give a single day, a single moment, a slightly different sheen.

Sympathy is the child of imagination