Leslie Jamison Quotes

Quotes about:

• Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.

  Leslie Jamison

  Mean, Knowing, Imagination

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.8, Granta Books

  55 Copy quote

• Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

  Leslie Jamison

  Choices, Empathy, Brain

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.23, Granta Books

  18 Copy quote

• When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

  Leslie Jamison

  People, Empathy, Theft

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.20, Granta Books

  8 Copy quote

• No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

  Leslie Jamison

  Life, Boundaries, Trauma

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.9, Granta Books

  15 Copy quote

• Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

  Leslie Jamison

  Knowing, Empathy, Knows

  6 Copy quote

• I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally - that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then - if you're hard on yourself, in good ways - pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale.

  Leslie Jamison

  Thinking, Empathy, Attention

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

  Leslie Jamison

  Pain, Yield, Blood

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.167, Granta Books

  10 Copy quote

• Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

  Leslie Jamison

  Hurt, Commonality

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.13, Granta Books

  8 Copy quote

• Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

  Leslie Jamison

  Pain, Too Much, Failing

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.21, Granta Books

  7 Copy quote

• I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

  Leslie Jamison

  Writing, Thinking, Topics

  Source: therumpus.net

  7 Copy quote

• I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

  Leslie Jamison

  Knowing, Anxiety, Horizon

  7 Copy quote

• Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.

  Leslie Jamison

  Empathy, Our Actions, Might

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Post-​wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-​pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-​absorption without self-​awareness.

  Leslie Jamison

  Sarcastic, Hurt, Clever

  10 Copy quote

• I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empathy that rearticulates more clearly what it's shown.

  Leslie Jamison

  People, Empathy, Feelings

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.16, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• You pass the old L.A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L.A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.

  Leslie Jamison

  Beautiful, Color, Jail

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.72, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.

  Leslie Jamison

  Issues, Empathy, Limits

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.

  Leslie Jamison

  Sentiments, Suspects, Ifs

  4 Copy quote

• Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.

  Leslie Jamison

  Hook

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.13, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• The global phenomenon of poverty tourism - or 'poorism' - has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation.

  Leslie Jamison

  Past, Years, Battle

  11 Copy quote

• It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.

  Leslie Jamison

  Writing, Character, Plot

  7 Copy quote

• Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

  Leslie Jamison

  Age, Answers, Might

  7 Copy quote

• I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

  Leslie Jamison

  Drunk, Chocolate, Melting

  Leslie Jamison (2010). “The Gin Closet”, p.52, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• We don't want to be wounds ("No, you're the wound!") but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be something more than just another girl who has one. We should be able to do these things without failing the feminism of our mothers, and we should be able to represent women who hurt without walking backward into a voyeuristic rehashing of the old cultural models.

  Leslie Jamison

  Girl, Mother, Hurt

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.174, Granta Books

  4 Copy quote

• I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings.

  Leslie Jamison

  Thinking, Offering, Curiosity

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say 'all kinds,' but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.

  Leslie Jamison

  Mean, Writing, People

  4 Copy quote

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