Quotes by 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 its shown.

Empathy isnt just listening, its asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to.

This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. Its a quick fix of empathy.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

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.

Its easier, somehow, if theres 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. Theres 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.

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…”)

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

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging Say it new! Say it new! Its 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.

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.

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.

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