Leslie Jamison > Quotes

“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, The Empathy Exams

“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 another because we know we should, or because it's asked for, but this doesn't make our caring hollow. This 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, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Gin Closet

“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, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“Empathy isn't just listening, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

“I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Gin Closet

“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 Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universe, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it - through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of "leaving" aren't the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms - the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Empathy isn’t just remembering to say that must really be 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 requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see:”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“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, The Empathy Exams

“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 Empathy Exams

“We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“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 Empathy Exams

“Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.”
― Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

“The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figure of the angry woman reframed as threat — not the one who has been harmed, but the one bent on harming. She conjures a lineage of threatening archetypes: the harpy and her talons, the witch and her spells, the medusa and her writhing locks. The notion that female anger is unnatural or destructive is learned young; children report perceiving displays of anger as more acceptable from boys than from girls.”
― Leslie Jamison

“Being an adult meant watching many possible versions of yourself whittle into just one.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

“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, The Gin Closet