Leslie Jamison Quotes
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.
No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.
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.
When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.
Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.
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.
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.
I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.
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.
Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.
Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.
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.
Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.
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.
Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.
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.
Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.
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.
It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.
facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.
Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.
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.
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.
We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.