Top 120 Leslie Jamison Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.”

— Leslie Jamison

2. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

4. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

5. “Whenever I’ve been stuck on a project, it’s always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It’s a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.”

— Leslie Jamison

6. “In his theory of the sublime, eighteenth-century philosopher Edmund Burke proposes the notion of “negative pain”: the idea that a feeling of fear – paired with a sense of safety, and the ability to look away – can produce a feeling of delight. One woman can sit on her couch with a glass of Chardonnay and watch another woman drink away her life.”

— Leslie Jamison

7. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

8. “When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.”

— Leslie Jamison

9. “Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response. My Stephanie script is twelve pages long. I think mainly about what it doesn’t say.”

— Leslie Jamison

10. “Empathy is always perched precariously between gift and invasion.”

— Leslie Jamison

11. “I’ve always treasured empathy as the particular privilege of the invisible, the observers who are shy precisely because they sense so much – because it is overwhelming to say even a single word when you’re sensitive to every last flicker of nuance in the room.”

— Leslie Jamison

12. “We care in order to be cared for. We care because we are porous. The feelings of others matter, they are like matter: they carry weight, exert gravitational pull.”

— Leslie Jamison

13. “Guess your feelings is like charming a cobra with a stethoscope, a boyfriend told me once. Meaning what? Meaning that pain turned me venomous, that diagnosing me required a specialised kind of enchantment, that I flaunted feelings and withheld their origins at once.”

— Leslie Jamison

14. “I am human: nothing human is alien to me.”

— Leslie Jamison

15. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

16. “When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say ‘all kinds,’ but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.”

— Leslie Jamison

17. “Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.”

— Leslie Jamison

18. “In my own life as a reader I experience real moments of alienation when a writer feels too perfect, or like even the flaws they are admitting are somehow noble, or dysfunctional in an overly edgy, aesthetically pleasing way.”

— Leslie Jamison

19. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

20. “Sometimes we’re all trying to purge something. And what we’re trying to purge resists our purging.”

— Leslie Jamison

21. “The phenomenon of female anger has often been turned against itself, the figure of the angry woman reframed as threat – not the one who has been harmed, but the one bent on harming. She conjures a lineage of threatening archetypes: the harpy and her talons, the witch and her spells, the medusa and her writhing locks. The notion that female anger is unnatural or destructive is learned young; children report perceiving displays of anger as more acceptable from boys than from girls.”

— Leslie Jamison

22. “How do we represent female pain without producing a culture in which this pain has been fetishized to the point of fantasy or imperative?”

— Leslie Jamison

23. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

24. “I needed to look at him and see the opposite of my fear, not its echo.”

— Leslie Jamison

25. “I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore.”

— Leslie Jamison

26. “It seems there are two kinds of American writers. Those who drink, and those who used to.”

— Leslie Jamison

27. “The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universe, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it – through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of “leaving” aren’t the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms – the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.”

— Leslie Jamison

28. “Girl gets; girl gets; girl gets. Not that she is granted things but that things keep happening to her, until they don’t – until she starts doing unto others as they have done, hurting everyone who ever hurt her, moving the world with her mind, conducting its objects like an orchestra.”

— Leslie Jamison

29. “This was the double blade of how I felt about anything that hurt: I wanted someone else to feel it with me, and also I wanted it entirely for myself.”

— Leslie Jamison

30. “I had this terrible feeling that every woman who knew anything about anything was tired of Sylvia Plath, tired of her blood and bees and the level of narcissistic self-pity required to compare her father to Hitler- but I’d been left behind. I hadn’t gotten the highbrow girl-memo: Don’t Read the Girls Who Cried Pain.”

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

32. “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:.”

— Leslie Jamison

33. “The truth of this place is infinite and irreducible, and self-reflexive anguish might feel like the only thing that you can offer in return. It might be hard to hear anything above the clattering machinery of your guilt. Try to listen anyways.”

— Leslie Jamison

34. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

35. “This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it. Figurative.”

— Leslie Jamison

36. “How does the morally outraged mind begin to arrange its materials? And then – once it begins to doubt itself – how does it rearrange them all over again?”

— Leslie Jamison

37. “Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.”

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

39. “Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.”

— Leslie Jamison

40. “The same hunger sends us to prayer and sugar and sweetener and text: the rush of comfort that comes from quick taste, the body suddenly filled with a sensation beyond itself – foreign and seductive. Sentimentality.”

— Leslie Jamison

41. “She is going through something large and she shouldn’t be afraid to confess its size, shouldn’t be afraid she’s ‘making too big a deal of it.’ She shouldn’t be afraid of not feeling enough because the feelings will keep coming – different ones – for years. I would tell her that commonality doesn’t inoculate against hurt.”

— Leslie Jamison

42. “Freedom from one man is just another one.”

— Leslie Jamison

43. “Though I saw us living in binary – Dave wanted to be free, and I wanted to be certain – in truth we were asking so many of the same questions: what it meant to let your edges dissolve, to be surprised, to touch some dream or being larger than yourself.”

— Leslie Jamison

44. “I was ashamed. I wouldn’t be able to explain this properly to anyone. It had something to do with being seen. Everything was visible to them – swollen face, bloody arms, bloody legs, bloody clothes. These were the only things I was composed of, and everyone saw them – everyone understood them – as well as I could. It was a kind of nakedness, a feeling of nerve endings in the wind.”

— Leslie Jamison

45. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

46. “Everyone talks about weddings as beginnings but the truth is they are also endings. They give a horizon of closure to things that have been slowly dissolving for years: flirtations, friendships, shared innocence, shared rootlessness, shared loneliness.”

— Leslie Jamison

47. “Imagining someone else’s pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.”

— Leslie Jamison

48. “This is the grand fiction of tourism, that bringing our bodies somewhere draws that place closer to us, or we to it. It’s a quick fix of empathy.”

— Leslie Jamison

49. “Commonality doesn’t inoculate against hurt.”

— Leslie Jamison

50. “And if Annie’s work is fueled by love, then it’s a form of love that doesn’t blunt or distort her gaze. Her love sharpens her sight. Her work has helped me trust that an enduring emotional investment – even in all its mess and mistakes, because of its mess and mistakes – can help you see more acutely. It can sensitize your gaze to the competing vectors of emotional churning beneath ordinary moments.”

— Leslie Jamison