Quotes by Leslie Jamison

A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—​and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?

Pain without cause is a pain we cant trust. We assume its been chosen or fabricated.

We want our wounds to speak for themselves, but usually we end up having to speak for them.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep youd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another persons pain as youd 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?

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.

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.

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.

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

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

Commonality doesnt inoculate against hurt.

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

Empathy isnt just something that happens to us - a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain - its also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. Its made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse. Sometimes we care for another because we know we should, or because its asked for, but this doesnt 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.

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 didnt call. But I dont believe in a finite economy of empathy; I happen to think that paying attention yields as much as it taxes.

I didnt enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. My Stephanie script is twelve pages long. I think mainly about what it doesnt say.

Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.

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

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 werent entirely aware we had.