Quotessence
Home / Topics / Unpleasantness Quotes

Unpleasantness Quotes

Browse 5 quotes about Unpleasantness.

Unpleasantness Quotes

“When a story is unpleasant, it is hard to focus on details that allow you to put yourself in the place of the subject, because the pain of distortion starts to feel familiar. Paying attention often requires some sort of empathy for the subject, or at the very least, for the speaker. But empathy, these days, is hard to come by. Maybe this is because everyone is having such a hard time being understood themselves. Or because empathy requires us to dig way down into the murk, deeper than our own feelings go, to a place where the boundaries between our experience and everyone else's no longer exist.”

PainAttentionEmpathyRecognitionSympathyUnpleasantness
Book:The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
Create image

“(Nor was Shelley’s dad of any interest to Mira as an adversary. He was a mortgage broker with an irritable disposition who was always, in the family parlance, ‘in a rage’--an infirmity openly encouraged, as Mira pointed out, by his wife, who indeed devoted an unusual proportion of her daily conversation to reminding her husband of the many kinds of people in the world whom he disliked. That this list, which included vegans, slow walkers, loudmouths, ostentatious breast-feeders, people of indeterminate gender, buskers, bad drivers, and the unwashed, covered in one way or another the entire membership of Birnam Wood, Mira did not appear to find insulting. She saw Shelley’s father as a creature of his wife’s devising, not an autonomous adult, but a hapless pawn designed by Mrs Noakes for the solitary purpose of throwing her own, more vivid personality into greater relief--a plainly narcissistic exercise of which she, Mira, could not remotely see the appeal.)”

RelationshipsParentsBiasesPrejudicesSpousesDislikesIrritabilityUnpleasantness
Book:Birnam Wood
Create image