Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

Hope had only revealed herself to him when he was immersed in darkness

I understand that it's good tactics to categorize me as a close-minded, unobjective extremist, but nobody that respects me has those views.

Your mom was right when she told you never to discuss politics and religion because emotions run so high in those arenas. Especially religion.

I ask you: turn a deaf ear to the special interests. Let politics stand down for a while. don't waste anytime thinking about future elections until we've done our jobs here.

The eyes have one language everywhere.

How can you contrive to write so even?

I think what I bring to the table overall is a sense of my own individuality, especially in the urban-male spectrum of what is here and now.

Crossing at a ford occurs often in a man's lifetime. It means setting sail even though your friends stay in harbour, knowing the route, knowing the soundness of your ship and the favour of the day.

What good is a life lived as if it made no difference at all to the great life of the world? - Fool

The role of private equity as fiduciaries is certainly to make money.