Pity's akin to love.

To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain.

"Robin is not in your life, you are in her dream, you'll never get out of it. And why does Robin feel innocent? Every bed she leaves, without caring, fills her heart with peace and happiness. She has made her "escape" again. That's why she can't "put herself in another's place," she herself is the only "position"; so she resents it when you reproach her with what she had done. She knows she is innocent because she can't do anything in relation to anyone but herself."

Robin felt her luck, these days, at having two loving parents. Her work had taught her how many people weren’t that fortunate, how many people had families that were broken beyond repair, how many adults walked around carrying invisible scars from their earliest childhood, their perceptions and associations forever altered by lack of love, by violence, by cruelty.

When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.

…I have to be in this frame of mind where I’m feeling pity for myself, and feeling pity for the world. Once I’ve attained the summit of this, then I have to sit down and write…

One thing I found out then was that pity is a form of love and, actually, its highest expression.
A Tale of Two Sisters

The moral sense is at the root of pity. Pity means compassion — the capacity to resent someone else's suffering as if it were one's own. The absence of pity is a mark of obtuseness: incapacity of identifying oneself with those who are in pain or downtrodden. Worthy of pity are mainly mistreated or bereaved children, the old, the sick, all those that are helpless and abused. This includes the majority of animals. And we mustn't ask ourselves whether or not they are able to go to heaven, whether or not they are able to reason, or to speak, or to count, or to vote, but we must ask ourselves only one question: "Are they able to suffer?" And it is their misfortune that they are only too able to suffer.

Robin told only a little of her life, but she kept repeating in one way or another her wish for a home, as if she were afraid she would be lost again, as if she were aware, without conscious knowledge, that she belonged to Nora, and that if Nora did not make it permanent by her own strength, she would forget.

She would never understand his craving for ease and luxury, for beauty, for love — his particular kind of love that went with show, pleasure, wealth, position, his eager and immutable aspirations and desires. She could not understand these things. She would look on all of it as sin — evil, selfishness. And in connection with all the fatal steps involving Roberta and Sondra, as adultery — unchastity — murder, even. And she would and did expect him to be terribly sorry and wholly repentant, when, even now, and for all he had said to the Reverend McMillan and to her, he could not feel so — not wholly so — although great was his desire now to take refuge in God, but better yet, if it were only possible, in her own understanding and sympathetic heart. If it were only possible.

He had no name for it in the language of Ka; there was no name for it because he was the first Crow ever to feel it within him. Pity for them in the awful complications of the lives they built for themselves, laboring as helplessly and ceaselessly as bees building their combs, but their combs held no honey, he thought now. Useless, useless, and worse than useless, needless: the labor of their lives, the battles and deaths, and all their own doing. He lifted his wings to fly, to fly from this pity, but he could not; folded them in disorder; bowed with open mouth in pity.
If only he had not gone into Ymr. For out of Ymr he had brought pity into Ka, and now could never get it out.

She was horribly sorry for Libby, to the point where she could hardly bear seeing her; Libby's red open mouth, continually gabbling, was like a running wound in the middle of her open face.

There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

Both looked back then on the wild revelry...and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.