Danni Harrison

“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

“Iosif Abramson. Date of birth, date of death. The tea was bitter and he blamed existence.’” He”
― Boris Fishman, A Replacement Life

“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, The Empathy Exams

“Words pack power and these definitions are laden with values, often wildly idiosyncratic ones. Here’s an example, namely the ways I think about the word “competition”: (a) “competition”—your lab team races the Cambridge group to a discovery (exhilarating but embarrassing to admit to); (b) “competition”—playing pickup soccer (fine, as long as the best player shifts sides if the score becomes lopsided); (c) “competition”—your child’s teacher announces a prize for the best outlining-your-fingers Thanksgiving turkey drawing (silly and perhaps a red flag—if it keeps happening, maybe complain to the principal); (d) “competition”—whose deity is more worth killing for? (try to avoid).”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst