Quotessence
Home / Authors / Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison Quotes

Novelist

Filter quotes by topic

AllEmpathyPainIfsFeelsLovePeopleThinkingWayWritingKindKnowingKnowsStoriesAttentionHelpHumanHurtKindnessMightPoverty

Famous Leslie Jamison Quotes

“This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point - the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one.”

KindnessGraceEmpathyHuman
Book:Make It Scream, Make It Burn
Create image

“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.”

CompassionEmpathy
Book:The Empathy Exams
Create image

“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.”

Empathy
Book:The Empathy Exams
Create image

“It’s easier, somehow, if there’s 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. There’s 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.”

ReasonJusticeEmpathyTragedyExplanationBalance Human
Book:The Empathy Exams
Create image