Leslie Jamison Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion ... Empathy isn't just remembering to say 'that must be really hard'
it's figuring out how to bring difficulty into the light so it can be seen at all. 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 means realizing trauma has no discreet edges.p7 — Leslie Jamison

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

It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling. — 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

It wasn't likely I would die. Dave didn't know that then. Prayer isn't about likelihood anyway, it's about desire
loving someone enough to get on your knees and ask for her to be saved. When he cried in that chapel, it wasn't empathy
it was something else. His kneeling wasn't a way to feel to my pain but to request that it end. - p19 — Leslie Jamison

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

Confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that intentionality is the enemy of love. But I believe in intention and I believe in work. I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones. — Leslie Jamison

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

The neglect here is almost unimaginable - and it's not just neglect from the Beckley staff but from the world itself - the world that has carried on with its daily business while keeping all these men invisibly deposited elsewhere, in a slew of the nation's most obscure corners. On the outside, you can think about prison for a moment and then you can think about something else. — 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

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

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

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

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

Pain that gets performed is still pain. — Leslie Jamison

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

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

Freedom from one man is just another one. — Leslie Jamison

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

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

I walk among the young and healthy and I am more or less one of them. I am trying not to itch. I am trying not to think about whether I'm itching. I am trying not to take my skin for granted. Sometimes my heart beats too fast, or a worm lodges under the skin of my ankle, or I drink too much, or I am too thin, but these are sojourns away from a kingdom I can generally claim - of being okay, capable of desire and being desired, full of a sense I belong in the world. But when I leave the Baptist church on Slaughter Lane, I can't quite the voices of those who no longer feel they belong anywhere. I spend a day in their kingdom and then leave when I please. It feels like a betrayal to come up for air. — Leslie Jamison

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

everything proceeds from losing our place. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

Sometimes we're all trying to purge something. And what we're trying to purge resists our purging. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

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

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing. — Leslie Jamison

Feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction. — 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

Whatever we can't hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-of-date
twice-told, thrice-told, 1,001-nights-told
masks deeper accusations: that suffering women are playing victim, going weak, or choosing self-indulgence over bravery. I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore. Plug it up. Like somehow our task is to inhabit the jaded aftermath of terminal self-awareness once the story of all pain has already been told. — 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 as much as it taxes. — Leslie Jamison

Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy. — 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 extends perpetually beyond what you can see. — 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. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation. — Leslie Jamison

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

The unease of the tour is not the discomfort of being problematically present - South Central mediated by air-conditioning vents - so much as the discomfort of an abiding absence - a pattern of always being elsewhere, far away, our of ear- and eye- and gun-shot, humming beach to bistro along the Pacific Coast Highway. — Leslie Jamison

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. — 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: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there? — 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

In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of "negative pain": the idea that a feeling of fear - paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away - can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life. — Leslie Jamison

Now Pastor owns a small corner of the hood - or perhaps, more to the point, he owns a moment of his own experience. He can pack up his own heightened awareness like a souvenir. His opened eyes are take-home talismans. You want the tour to give you back another version of yourself, you and everyone: a more enlightened human. — Leslie Jamison

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

This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription - insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself - and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. — Leslie Jamison

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

Empathy is a kind of care but it's not the only kind of care, and it's not always enough. — Leslie Jamison

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

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

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

I was ashamed. I wouldn't be able to explain this properly to anyone. It had something to do with being seen. Everything was visible to them - swollen face, bloody arms, bloody legs, bloody clothes. These were the only things I was composed of, and everyone saw them - everyone understood them - as well as I could. It was a kind of nakedness, a feeling of nerve endings in the wind. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

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

Why do I hunger for significant barometers but find myself tethered to banality instead? — Leslie Jamison

Is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can't afford to turn it away, who need its jobs or revenue, who must endure the quiet violence of its physical presence - its "Don't Pick Up Hitchhikers" warning signs, its barbed fences - the same way a place must endure the removal of its mountaintops and the plundering of its seams: because a powerful rhetoric insists we can only be delivered from our old scars by tolerating new ones. — Leslie Jamison

When we criticize sentimentality, perhaps part of what we fear is the possibility that it allows us to usurp the texts we read, insert ourselves and our emotional needs too aggressively into their narratives, clog their situations and their syntax with our tears. Which brings us back to the danger that we're mainly crying for ourselves, or at least to feel ourselves cry. — Leslie Jamison

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

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

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren't hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation. Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it. — Leslie Jamison

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

I had this terrible feeling that every woman who knew anything about anything was tired of Sylvia Plath, tired of her blood and bees and the level of narcissistic self-pity required to compare her father to Hitler- but I'd been left behind. I hadn't gotten the highbrow girl-memo: Don't Read the Girls Who Cried Pain. — 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 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

That was a moment where something clarified about shame for me: it's not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it's pointing at something, some confusing blend of fear and desire. There was liberation in that, thinking of shame as something to follow, like a path - rather than simply something to be paralyzed by, or try to dissolve, or become second-level meta-shamed by (i.e. "I shouldn't even be having this feeling of shame ... ") — Leslie Jamison

Sometimes I do feel exposed. I have this kind of theory about different channels or levels of relaying experience - when I tell someone, one on one, in a personal context, about something that's happened to me - that has a very different valence, a different charge, than when/if I've said it in a public forum. — 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 which we can direct our rage but can also understand, at some primal level, as an extension of ourselves. — Leslie Jamison