Top 66 Leslie Jamison Quotes
#1. Feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction.
Leslie Jamison
#2. 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
#3. How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative?
Leslie Jamison
#4. 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
#5. We found a book called Alexander, about a boy who confesses all his misdeeds to his father by blaming them on an imaginary red-and-green striped horse. Alexander was a pretty bad horse today. Whatever we can't hold, we hang onto a hook that will hold it.
Leslie Jamison
#6. We watch a character define himself entirely through what he will not claim. If I could choose one item from my entire apartment, what would I disown? It might be my trash can full of ripped paper packets, which might mean that this pile of packets is my most honest expression of self.
Leslie Jamison
#7. I didn't enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.
Leslie Jamison
#8. 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
#9. She was scared about leaving everything, and I got that, but I also knew you couldn't start living in the new place until you said fuck-all to the old.
Leslie Jamison
#10. I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.
Leslie Jamison
#11. In my own life as a reader I experience real moments of alienation when a writer feels too perfect, or like even the flaws they are admitting are somehow noble, or dysfunctional in an overly edgy, aesthetically pleasing way.
Leslie Jamison
#12. I'd be lying if I wrote that I remember exactly what he said. I don't. Which is the sad half life of arguments - we usually remember our side better.
Leslie Jamison
#13. Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough.
Leslie Jamison
#14. I don't know if what I'm seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they're not worms, or whether I want them to be worms or not, or what I have to believe about this woman if they aren't worms, or about the world or human bodies or this disease if they are.
Leslie Jamison
#15. You've come to understand gang violence as symptomatic of an abiding civil conflict whose proportions we can only begin to fathom; now you watch church kids fumble their fingers toward Eastside, toward Killaz.
Leslie Jamison
#16. Guess your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope, a boyfriend told me once. Meaning what? Meaning that pain turned me venomous, that diagnosing me required a specialised kind of enchantment, that I flaunted feelings and withheld their origins at once.
Leslie Jamison
#18. Oscar Wilde summed up the indignation: A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
Leslie Jamison
#19. Why do I hunger for significant barometers but find myself tethered to banality instead?
Leslie Jamison
#20. I obsessed, and told myself this obsession was empathy. But it wasn't, quite. It was more like inpathy. I wasn't expatriating myself into another life so much as importing its problems into my own. p 20
Leslie Jamison
#21. No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.
Leslie Jamison
#22. The same hunger sends us to prayer and sugar and sweetener and text: the rush of comfort that comes from quick taste, the body suddenly filled with a sensation beyond itself - foreign and seductive. Sentimentality
Leslie Jamison
#23. Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.
Leslie Jamison
#24. Whatever we can't hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.
Leslie Jamison
#26. 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
#27. Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.
Leslie Jamison
#29. 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
#30. Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets. Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don't - until she starts doing unto others as they have done, hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra.
Leslie Jamison
#31. This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It's a quick fix of empathy.
Leslie Jamison
#32. It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you'd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.
Leslie Jamison
#33. I wanted Dave to guess what I needed at precisely the same time I needed it. I wanted him to imagine how much small signals of his presence might mean.
Leslie Jamison
#34. We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren't entirely aware we had.
Leslie Jamison
#35. The 'here' of Watts is pastel houses with window gratings in curly patterns. 'Here' is yard sales with bins full of stuffed animals and used water guns. Here is Crips turf.
Leslie Jamison
#36. But it's exhausting to keep tabs on how much someone is feeling for you. It can make you forget that they feel too.
Leslie Jamison
#37. Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.
Leslie Jamison
#38. I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.
Leslie Jamison
#39. The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.
Leslie Jamison
#40. We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull.
Leslie Jamison
#41. Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.
Leslie Jamison
#42. Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.
Leslie Jamison
#43. Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.
Leslie Jamison
#44. Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.
Leslie Jamison
#45. 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
#46. Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
Leslie Jamison
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.
Leslie Jamison
#50. Sure, some news is bigger news than other news. War is bigger news than a girl having mixed feelings about the way some guy fucked her and didn't call. But I don't believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.
Leslie Jamison
#51. Sometimes we're all trying to purge something. And what we're trying to purge resists our purging.
Leslie Jamison
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.
Leslie Jamison
#55. Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.
Leslie Jamison
#56. Childbirth shapes women as a horizon of anticipation. Women come into consciousness, she speculated, imagining a future pain toward which their bodies inevitably propel them.
Leslie Jamison
#57. Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.
Leslie Jamison
#60. That the hardship facilitates a shared solitude, an utter isolation that has been experienced before, by others, and will be experienced again, that these others are present in spirit even if the wilds have tamed or aged or brutalized or otherwise removed their bodies.
Leslie Jamison
#61. 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
#62. Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
Leslie Jamison
#63. 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
#64. I've always treasured empathy as the particular privilege of the invisible, the observers who are shy precisely because they sense so much--because it is overwhelming to say even a single word when you're sensitive to every last flicker of nuance in the room.
Leslie Jamison
#65. 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
#66. It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.
Leslie Jamison
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