Quotes About Reading And Empathy

#1. When in Reading Gaol he told me that the warders in the dock had been gentle and kind, but the visit of the chaplain in his first prison began with these words:
'Mr. Wilde, did you have morning prayers in your house?'
'I am sorry ... I fear not.'
'You see where you are now!

Charles Ricketts

#2. The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy - the insertion of oneself into the life of another.

Julie Schumacher

#3. Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Malorie Blackman

#4. Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.

Antonya Nelson

#5. Half the point in reading novels and seeing plays and films is to exercise the faculty of sympathy with our own kind, so often obliterated in the multifarious controls and compulsions of actual social existence.

Germaine Greer

#6. Even worse than seeing women's privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy.

Emma Watson

#7. Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met, living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character's skin.

Ann Patchett

#8. Ultimately, knowing God and reading the Word, it helps with patience with people, understanding, empathy and sympathy that they might not have that I have. If God gave it to me, why not exercise it?

Trai Byers

#9. The use of imaginative fiction is to deepen your understanding of your world, and your fellow men, and your own feelings, and your destiny.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#10. 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.

Patrick Rothfuss

#11. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

James Baldwin

#12. Reading stories forces us to exercise our empathy and imagination muscles, and that helps us conceive what the Bible depicts or demands, helps us connect with others, helps us illustrate what the text teaches, and helps us apply the text's truths.

James M. Hamilton

#13. Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

Jennifer Haigh

#14. You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.

Miriam Adeney

#15. Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.

George Crumb

#16. Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.

Julianna Baggott

#17. I believe reading books is one of the best ways to gain real empathy for people different from ourselves, and helping boys develop empathy for girls is a cause worth fighting for.

Shannon Hale

#18. Hope is the spotlight that shines on the mine fields of possibility

Tony Dovale

#19. I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

Claire Danes

#20. The birds fly in the wrong places and there are too many stars in the sky.

Anthony Horowitz

#21. Bring you comics in bed, scrape the mold off the bread, and serve you French toast again. Okay, I still get stoned.

Sheryl Crow

#22. That's what reading was for my mother, and became for me - a way to escape, a private time machine, a place that began with moral instruction but soon morphed into empathy and imagination.

Ramona Koval

#23. We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

Bill Drayton

#24. The counsellor who never reads a novel or never opens a book of poetry is neglecting an important resource for empathic development.

Dave Mearns