Leslie Jamison Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
I wanted to be loved because I deserved it. Except I was scared to be loved like this, because what if I stopped deserving it? Unconditional love was insulting, but conditional love was terrifying.

Leslie Jamison