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If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

Yann Martel
Pain, Empathy, Skins
"Yann Martel: 'Jewish people don't own the Holocaust'" by Stephen Moss, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2010.
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.