Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

Difficulty is our most reliable narrative engine.

— Leslie Jamison

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

— Leslie Jamison

Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.

— Leslie Jamison

The story of getting better can be just as compelling as the story of falling apart.

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

— Leslie Jamison

Redeeming subjects from cliche is its own pleasure and privilege.

— Leslie Jamison

It's not just that everyone has a story. It's that everyone has a thousand stories. Everyone is infinite.

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we…

— Leslie Jamison

My dad is an economist who does global development research. What he practices is a kind of quantifiable empathy: trying to empathize…

— Leslie Jamison

Probably every person is some mixture of wanting to feel a sense of commonality and shared experience with others but also wanting…

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to figure out what to say at the dinner table.

— Leslie Jamison

I had never really thought of myself as a baby person, but it's just a really profound connection.

— 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.…

— Leslie Jamison

I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally - that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping…

— Leslie Jamison

One of the big ways in which I felt my own writing life shaped by recovery had to do with my relationship…

— Leslie Jamison

In my own life as a reader I experience real moments of alienation when a writer feels too perfect, or like even…

— Leslie Jamison

When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative…

— 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…

— Leslie Jamison

I used to believe that hurting would make you more alive to the hurting of others. I used to believe in feeling…

— Leslie Jamison

The idea that a story has to be 'exceptional' in order to be worth telling is curious to me. What if we…

— Leslie Jamison

“Prison is a wound we keep tucked in those parts of the country that can’t afford to turn it away, who need…

— Leslie Jamison

“confession of effort chafes against the notion that empathy should always rise unbidden, that genuine means the same thing as unwilled, that…

— Leslie Jamison

We don't want to be wounds ("No, you're the wound!") but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having…

— Leslie Jamison

“That was a moment where something clarified about shame for me: it’s not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it’s…

— Leslie Jamison

“The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figure of the angry woman reframed as threat — not…

— Leslie Jamison

“Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging "Say it new! Say it new!" It's…

— Leslie Jamison

“I was ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to explain this properly to anyone. It had something to do with being seen. Everything…

— Leslie Jamison

“Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion... Empathy isn't just remembering to say 'that must be really hard' -- it's…

— Leslie Jamison

'Tough' is one of the last adjectives I would use to describe myself.

— Leslie Jamison

I feel like I have a bit of a Type A personality.

— Leslie Jamison

I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense…

— Leslie Jamison

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative…

— Leslie Jamison

Learning the edges or limits or sources of friction in empathy was one of the big issues for me.

— 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 something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a…

— Leslie Jamison

I do like arranging things. I like order. I basically like all these things that are the opposite of what people associate…

— Leslie Jamison