“Perhaps if we say it straight, we suspect, if we express our sentiments too excessively or too directly, we'll find we're nothing but banal.” IfsSuspectsSentiments Author:Leslie Jamison
“I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally - that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then - if you're hard on yourself, in good ways - pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale.” IfsThinkingWayHardActionForceAttentionEffectsHabitEmpathyScalesPushingTranslateGood WayCumulative Author:Leslie Jamison
“Sometimes I do feel exposed. I have this kind of theory about different channels or levels of relaying experience - when I tell someone, one on one, in a personal context, about something that's happened to me - that has a very different valence, a different charge, than when/if I've said it in a public forum.” IfsFeelsKindSaidDifferentSometimesLevelsHappenedTheoryExposedForumsOne On One Author:Leslie Jamison
“When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.” PeopleIfsKnowsHappenedEmpathyHappeningsThings HappenBad ThingsTheftBad Things Happen Book:The Empathy Exams: Essays Source: The Empathy Exams: Essays
“After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.” IfsWayMindStillsMatterStoriesValuesNovelSickBlindFlawsRoughFinishingEdits Author:Leslie Jamison
“It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.” IfsWritingCharacterPlotGesturesLiberating Author:Leslie Jamison
