“Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us—a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain—it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s 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 the 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 arise 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.”

Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Each time you happen to me all over again.”

Edith Wharton

“A lover with stay in their eyes.”

Té V. Smith, Lilac Springs

“After many strange thoughts,
Thoughts of distant harbors, and new life,
I came in and found the moonlight lying on the floor.”

Robert Bly, “After Working”

“I have a preconception in the book I’m writing that the pronoun ‘I’ is a word which should be given back to people, who need it, but deepened.”

Alice Notley, “Thinking and Poetry,” Coming After: Essays on Poetry

“What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?”

Jacques Lacan