Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.
If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.
Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticise?
If empathy is the skill or ability to tap into our own experiences in order to connect with an experience someone is relating to us, compassion is the willingness to be open to this process.
It is an absolute human certainty that no one can know his own beauty or perceive a sense of his own worth until it has been reflected back to him in the mirror of another loving, caring human being.
Missing someone, they say, is self-centered. I self-center you more than ever.
No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her.
That’s how you know you love someone, I guess, when you can’t experience anything without wishing the other person were there to see it, too.
The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we’ve lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we’ve found each other. And maybe each time, we’ve been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.
I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds – but I think of you always in those intervals.
When a mother dies, a daughter’s mourning never completely ends.
I fell in love with her when we were together, then fell deeper in love with her in the years we were apart.