Compassion quickly arises from noble hearts that feel the sharp stings suffered by others as if in their own flesh.

We become neighbors when we are willing to cross the road for one another. There is a lot of road crossing to do. We are all very busy in our own circles. We have our own people to go to and our own...

With my bright shirt and stick with a hook on the top, I set off every morning to... clean the beaches. So many, oh so many human bodies lie there in the light. And so many souls are lost in darkness....

I will not say do not cry, for not all tears are bitter.

For all our mythologizing, the margins can be painful and some people are there because they have no choice.

The thing to remember when you're writing, is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don't care what literary device you might use, or...

I had observed that neurotypicals criticised autistic people for lacking empathy… but seldom made any effort to improve their own empathy towards autistic people. Pg 318

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you'd think I should like to share...

I learn from my own daughter that you don't have to be awake to cry.

A funeral is like a little game, really. You have to just play along and say the right thing and behave the right way until it's over. Be pleasant but don't smile too much; be sad but don't overdo it...

There are two varieties of men. Some understand 'something of women', the others are those who simply 'understand women'. I don't know which variety is more suspicious to me.

for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred...

Nelson Mandela once said, 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.' He was so right. When you make the...

I did not know how to reach him, how to catch up with him... The land of tears is so mysterious.

Other people's sorrows and joys have a way of reminding us of our own; we partly empathize with them because we ask ourselves: What about me? What does that say about my life, my pains, my anguish?

An android, he said, doesn't care what happens to another android. That's one of the indications we look for.Then, Miss Luft said, you must be an android.

Be warned: If you allow yourself to see dignity in someone, you have doomed yourself to wanting to understand and help whoever it is."If you see dignity in anything, in fact--it doesn't have to be...

Is this what comes at the end, I wondered? Maybe death is the great equaliser, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.