Harriet Beecher Stowe Quotes

One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.

Remember that every man is a variation of yourself

I have never met a person in whom I did not see myself reflected.

I write human stories. I write about people. Not as a product of their environment. But from the stance that everybody is made of the same thing.

All of us are much more human than otherwise.

The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.

When I write, my goal is to delve deeply enough into the human experience to find a sort of universality. Once you dig down underneath surface differences, we are all human beings. And all human beings want essentially the same things at our core. We want to love and be loved. We want to be safe. We want our loved ones to be safe.

As human beings, we aren't as individual as we'd like to believe we are. And I think that's what makes acting possible. Despite the fact that I have not experienced something, I have it in my human capacity to imagine it and to put myself in someone else's shoes, and to take someone else's circumstances personally.

As the writer, you're always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you're writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you've also nailed yourself.

Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect.

I think my mission, if I could call it that, as a storyteller is to try and find ways to show how similar we are and not how different we are.

Whatever the reason is, I am happiest when connecting with the human experience. It lets me know that I'm not alone in this world.

In each of us there is a little of all of us.

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.I am human: nothing human is alien to me.

the story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all

All our stories are simultaneously unique and desperately similar, aren't they?

I like it that in many ways we are all the same.

Humanity is so constituted that the basest criminal represents you and me, as well as the most glorious saint that walks on high. We are reflected in all other men; all other men are embodied in us.

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.

Nothing human is foreign to us

Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.

When I speak to you about myself, I am speaking to you about yourself. How is it you don't see that?

Our brains are so conditioned through education, through religion, to think we are separate entities with separate souls and so on. We are not individuals at all. We are the result of thousands of years of human experience, human endeavor and struggle.

Console yourself, dear man and brother; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.