Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be hard—it’s figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.
-- Leslie (The Empathy Exams)

Importance: This quote demonstrates that empathy requires more than a passive response to pain and suffering. True empathy requires not only seeing the pain that is obviously at hand, but it also means digging deeper to help uncover the pain that needs to be expressed but is being ignored or suppressed for some reason. In order to ask the kinds of questions that empathy requires, a person needs to hone their emotional intelligence and powers of observation in order to tune into the unspoken needs of a person in pain. The idea of bringing difficulty into the light so that it can be seen...