Quotes by Leslie Jamison

About Leslie Jamison:

Leslie Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. Her work has been published in Best New American Voices 2008, A Public Space, and Black Warrior Review. Originally from Los Angeles, she attended Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and undertook a Ph.D. in English literature at Yale. Her father is the economist and global health researcher Dean Jamison.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

Leslie Jamison

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: W...

Leslie Jamison

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 extend...

Leslie Jamison

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. It's made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for an...

Leslie Jamison

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

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...

Leslie Jamison

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

Leslie Jamison

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

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

Leslie Jamison

I don't know if what I'm seeing are worms, or where they come from, or what they might be if they're 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...

Leslie Jamison

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

Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

Leslie Jamison

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

Leslie Jamison

facts are aligned on shelves as well, necessarily chosen and arranged, assigned value by explanations neatly stuck where prices might have been.

Leslie Jamison

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

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

Freedom from one man is just another one.

Leslie Jamison

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Leslie Jamison

It's easier, somehow, if there's a reason for tragedy - lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There's something we recognize as human, a motive toward whi...

Leslie Jamison

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. ...

Leslie Jamison

Author Bio

  • NameLeslie Jamison
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist