The Empathy Exams Quotes
"Pain is at once actual and constructed, feelings are made based on how you speak them."
"Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to."
"Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination."
"Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see."
"Empathy isn’t just measured by checklist item 31—voiced empathy for my situation/problem—but by every item that gauges how thoroughly my experience has been imagined."
"Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all."
"Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia—em (into) and pathos (feeling)—a penetration, a kind of travel."
"It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?"
"Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough."
"Empathy is made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse."
"Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because it’s asked for, but this doesn’t make our caring hollow."
"The act of choosing simply means we’ve committed ourselves to a set of behaviors greater than the sum of our individual inclinations."
"I will listen to his sadness, even when I’m deep in my own."
"To say going through the motions—this isn’t reduction so much as acknowledgment of effort—the labor, the motions, the dance—of getting inside another person’s state of heart or mind."
"This confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love."
"But I believe in intention and I believe in work."
"I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones."
"I practice pronouncing ‘recidivism’ in the shower."
"The race known as the Barkley Marathons has begun."
"The Barkley Marathons, held yearly outside Wartburg, Tennessee, calls it 'The Race That Eats Its Young.'"
"The laws of physics and human tolerance have been replaced by Laz's personal whims."
"Running out of batteries is the must-avoid-at-all-costs-worst-possible-thing-that-could-happen."
"If you finish three, you’ve completed what’s known as the Fun Run."
"Photographs objectify, they turn an event or person into something that can be possessed."
"I realize Laz and I will have many hours to spend in each other’s company. The runners are out on their loops anywhere from eight to thirty-two hours."
"This is both succor and sadism; the oasis offers respite and temptation at once."
"One time I started at three," he says, as if in answer. "That was fun."
"Little bit frightening, actually," he says. "Like watching a mob turn ugly."
"Those suckers thought they’d never get found. Bet they were thinking: who the fuck would possibly come over this hill?"
"His greatest desire seems to be to devise an unrunnable race, to sustain the immortal horizon of an unbeatable challenge."
"Even just the sight of other human beings is a kind of aid," he explains. "We want them to feel the full weight of their aloneness."
"I broke my arm there in January," she says, "but it’s pretty."
"After nightfall," he assures Doc Joe, "there will be carnage."
"But I can’t help thinking his question dissolves precisely the kind of loneliness he seems so interested in producing."
"He wants to run a hundred miles when no one knows he’s running."
"You are talking to an inmate at a Federal Correctional Facility," and I walked down Trumbull Street in the twilight.
"Charlie is one of these bodies. His story is the story of a system that strip-mined the American housing market."
"I am free to nap when I want, go for a run when I want, fall in love, jump from a building, or eat cake till I puke," he says.
"What happens when you confine a man whose whole life is motion? I guess that, those laps."
"Every guy inside has a dream for when he leaves."
"Three o’clock is when one of us goes, the other one stays."
"Prison is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can’t afford to turn it away."
"She associates their science with the color green. Sadness is green as well, also tree leaves, and the nation of Germany."
"Gold was sunlight on asphalt. Gold was the gleam of metal through an open wound."
"Ex-votos are full of Frida’s hope, and her stubbornness: hers was a body pulled almost gravitationally toward injury, but her paintings point ceaselessly at grace."
"Don’t weep to me. The wounded one will not permit herself. And yet, does."
"Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight."
"Empathy is contagion. Agee catches it and passes it to us."
"A thousand meters below El Alto—in La Paz, during January—the Bolivians hold a traditional festival called Alasitas."
"A father takes pleasure in his son, over a telephone line, despite everything."
"One man’s joke is another girl’s diary entry."
"Keep cutting me open; I’ll keep bleeding it out."
"The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields."
"Pain without a cause is pain we can’t trust. We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated."
"Maybe drunken heartbreak was the lamest thing I could possibly write about, but this was precisely why I wanted to write about it."
"I realized that this causeless pain—inexplicable and seemingly intractable—was my true subject."
"The physical pain seemed almost easy in comparison."
"I don’t believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes."
"I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-of-date—twice-told, thrice-told, 1,001-nights-told—masks deeper accusations."
"Suffering is interesting but so is getting better."