Top Leslie Jamison Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Leslie Jamison Biography

Leslie Jamison (born 1983) is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison also directs the non-fiction concentration in writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.

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Leslie Jamison Quotes

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

Edges, Empathy, Issues, Learning, Limits, Sources

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

Anxiety, Glad, Horizon, Knowing, Mystery, Uncertainty

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

Empathy, Know, Knowing, Knows, Nothing, Requires

I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.

Lucky, Snhu, Teacher, Way, Work

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

Different, Editors, People, Reading, Sense

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.

Cake, Eat, Order, Should Have, Think, Thinking

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

Chocolate, Drunk, Full, Loved, Melting, Spreading

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Against, Commonality, Hurt, Inoculate

Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, jaded, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect, expose the shame of self-absorption without self-awareness.

Expose, Hurt, Pain, Sarcastic, Shame, Womanhood

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 it's shown.

Back, Empathy, Feelings, People, Shown, Superlative

I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings.

Cabinet, Curiosity, Offering, Sense, Thinking

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.

Completely, Finishing, Fresh, Matter, Mind, Sick

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

Failing, Imagine, Pain, Too Much

Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.

Actions, Empathy, Experiencing, Might, Our Actions, Realize

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

Age, Answers, Compelling, Easy, Might, Solely

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

Boundaries, Discrete, Edges, Life, Trauma

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.

Banal, Express, Ifs, Sentiments, Straight, Suspects

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

Hang, Hold, Hook

You pass the old L. A. County jail, which is surprisingly beautiful. It's got a handsome stone facade and stately columns. The new L. A. County jail - called The Twin Towers - isn't beautiful at all; it's a stucco panopticon the color of sick flesh.

Beautiful, Color, Columns, Jail, Sick, Stucco

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.

Charge, Different, Kind, Levels, Public, Relaying

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