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Quote by Sean Norris

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Heaven and Hurricanes

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Sean Norris

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“When I fell, I instantly had my "Oh, That's Why" realization and I would have known not to rollerskate through the house again, even if I had been alone. There is a loss of dignity that a child experiences when they've just suffered the consequences of something they were warned against by the Wiser One while the Wiser One gloats for being wiser, especially when the gloating is packaged as anger. But I was too young to examine gloating or anger or wisdom and she, the mother of a timid child who rarely got hurt, had not had many opportunities to consider the vulnerable state of an injured kid. We were both green and hurt and scared in this new way, together. As an adult, it helps me to view my mom as a singular woman beyond her role in my life, but also, as a child herself who does not, in fact, possess knowledge of all things. Our mother-daughter relationship was this huge, life-altering thing that we are both experiencing for the first time, at the same rate and we don't have answers, we only have things that we're trying out. This was true for my grandmother too; she was learning to be alive for the first time.”

LifeMotherFamilyChildhoodEmpathyDaughterMemoryMotherhoodGrandmother
Book:Handsome Vanilla
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“He stares into the flames that devour his beloved, hoping that they will curl into a spinning fireball from which she will speak. Or even that her voice will whistle from what is left of Patroclus' lips. Nothing. She has never failed him before. Has she turned from him forever for his disobedience and sacrilege? Is he eternally alone? Terror swiftly transmutes into fury, and he rises from his crouch, hands curled, ready to throttle the old man whose son has been the cause of his lover's death and now his mother's abandonment. He takes a step forward. Priam does not move, stooped under his impossible, invisible burden. Achilles does not advance further. His hands slowly relax. Though there are no words in his head, in an inarticulable moment he sees the old man's grief as one with his own.”

EmpathyBicameralism
Book:The Rage of Achilles
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“Empathy is no substitute for experience itself. We don’t get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are or are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”

EmpathyPrivilegeWhite Privilege
Book:Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
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“Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence. Once people stop wondering about others, once they no longer see others as a part of them, they disable their instinct for empathy. And once they lose empathy, they can do anything to them, or allow anything to be done to them. Entire institutions built to preserve the interests of one group of people over another depend on this failure of imagination. Violence comes in the form of policies by the state and sometimes by bloodshed in the streets. More often, it comes in forms that are hard to see, unless we find a way to make them visible through our stories.”

LoveWonderViolenceEmpathyOthers
Book:See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
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“Grace stopped in the door, dimly silhouetted by the dull gray morning light, and looked back at me, at my eyes, my mouth, my hands, in a way that made something inside me knot and unknot unbearably. I didn't think I belonged here in her world, a boy stuck between two lives, dragging the dangers of the wolves with me, but when she said my name, waiting for me to follow, I knew I'd do anything to stay with her.”

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Book:Shiver
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