Top 120 Leslie Jamison Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.”

— Leslie Jamison

52. “Joe was right when he said that the whale is just a whale. And so was Leonora when she said the whale is everything. What if we grant the whale his whaleness, grant him furlough from our metaphoric employ, but still allow the contours of his second self – the one we’ve made – and admit what he’s done for us?”

— Leslie Jamison

53. “Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.”

— Leslie Jamison

54. “I wanted Dave to guess what I needed at precisely the same time I needed it. I wanted him to imagine how much small signals of his presence might mean.”

— Leslie Jamison

55. “I’d be lying if I wrote that I remember exactly what he said. I don’t. Which is the sad half life of arguments – we usually remember our side better.”

— Leslie Jamison

56. “We found a book called Alexander, about a boy who confesses all his misdeeds to his father by blaming them on an imaginary red-and-green striped horse. Alexander was a pretty bad horse today. Whatever we can’t hold, we hang onto a hook that will hold it.”

— Leslie Jamison

57. “It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.”

— Leslie Jamison

58. “It can be a peculiar thing being black in this country. Even the people who claim to love you are capable of these little accidents of hate – the social equivalent of finding hair in your food.”

— Leslie Jamison

59. “Everything was happening because of my body or because of a choice I’d made. I needed something from the world I didn’t know how to ask for. I needed people – Dave, a doctor, anyone – 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

60. “Every paradise is made possible by blindness.”

— Leslie Jamison

61. “Sentimentality inflates a feeling into something that can’t sustain itself – a dream shape – that ultimately flakes off into dust, grit or gravel, useless remains.”

— Leslie Jamison

62. “Her tragedy is radiant; it makes her body something sculpted.”

— Leslie Jamison

63. “The ethical divide between showing up and coming back loomed large; it made me feel accused. This was respect, I thought: to look and keep looking, not to look away as soon as you’d gotten what you needed.”

— Leslie Jamison

64. “It wasn’t likely I would die. Dave didn’t know that then. Prayer isn’t about likelihood anyway, it’s about desire – loving someone enough to get on your knees and ask for her to be saved. When he cried in that chapel, it wasn’t empathy – it was something else. His kneeling wasn’t a way to feel to my pain but to request that it end. – p19.”

— Leslie Jamison

65. “Is it wrong to call it empathy when you trust the face of suffering, but not the source? How do I inhabit someone’s pain without inhabiting their particular understanding of that pain?”

— Leslie Jamison

66. “Don’t assume the contours of another person’s heart. Don’t assume its desires.”

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

68. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

69. “You thought the story kept changing, but the most important part never did. She was always just a woman in pain, sitting right in front of you. Sometimes it hurts just to stand. Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it, and sometimes you just do what you can.”

— Leslie Jamison

70. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison

72. “Feeling something was never simply a state of submission but always, also, a process of construction.”

— Leslie Jamison

73. “Oscar Wilde summed up the indignation: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.”

— Leslie Jamison

74. “Representing people always involves reducing them, and calling a project “done” involves making an uneasy truce with that reduction. But some part of me rails against that compression. Some part of me wants to keep saying: there’s more, there’s more, there’s more.”

— Leslie Jamison

75. “Why do I hunger for significant barometers but find myself tethered to banality instead?”

— Leslie Jamison

76. “Pain without cause is a pain we can’t trust. We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.”

— Leslie Jamison

77. “They acknowledge that the realities closest to us – the rhythms of our lives, the people we love most – are shaped by forces beyond the edges of our sight.”

— Leslie Jamison

78. “For years I’d been an expert at longing, an expert at loving from the state of not-quite-having, an expert at daydreaming and sinking back into the plush furniture of cinematic imagining.”

— Leslie Jamison

79. “Certain parts of Peter began to repel me: his insecurities about our relationship and about himself, his hunger for my reassurance. These parts of him echoed the parts of me that had been hungry for reassurance all my life; that was probably why they disgusted me. But I couldn’t see that then. I could only see that he’d gotten the same lip balm I’d gotten; he hadn’t even been able to choose his own brand.”

— Leslie Jamison

80. “It was hard to explain the almost in our love – to myself or anyone – how consuming it was, that sense of being almost able to make it work. His mind was the mind I most wanted to ask every question.”

— Leslie Jamison

81. “Everything between us felt exhausted, brittle, depleted. The hot magma of conflict – with all its heat and surge – had cooled into hardened ridges of resentment, a quieter lunar landscape.”

— Leslie Jamison

82. “Loneliness seeks out metaphors not just for definition but for the companionship of resonance, the promise of kinship in comparison.”

— Leslie Jamison

83. “Burroughs doesn’t want to be broken into explanations and reassembled into well-being. He wants to stand behind his subtitle: Unredeemed. The syllogisms of cause and effect dangle the prospect of transformation, but he’s not interested in that kind of redemption.”

— Leslie Jamison

84. “Now Pastor owns a small corner of the hood – or perhaps, more to the point, he owns a moment of his own experience. He can pack up his own heightened awareness like a souvenir. His opened eyes are take-home talismans. You want the tour to give you back another version of yourself, you and everyone: a more enlightened human.”

— Leslie Jamison

85. “Finding darkness in another story is so much less lonely than fearing the darkness is yours alone.”

— Leslie Jamison

86. “Empathy is cloaked in our actions – as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it’s empathy.”

— Leslie Jamison

87. “There was a little voice in me that considered the possibility that perhaps there were people who didn’t spend hours every day trying to decide if their desperate desire to drink had preceded recovery meetings or been created by them. But it irritated me, that voice. I tried not to listen to it.”

— Leslie Jamison

88. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

89. “Nights out turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What’s the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what’s left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself? How long until the waiter comes back and how likely is it someone else will ask him for another bottle?”

— Leslie Jamison

90. “I didn’t enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.”

— Leslie Jamison

91. “This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription – insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself – and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication.”

— Leslie Jamison

92. “She has the grace to imagine her way into the minds of people who won’t imagine hers.”

— Leslie Jamison

93. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

94. “Rhys once wrote in her journal. “I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be always alone.”

— Leslie Jamison

95. “We like who we become in response to injustice: it makes it easy to choose a side. Our capacity to care, to get angry, is called forth like some muscle we weren’t entirely aware we had.”

— Leslie Jamison

96. “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.”

— Leslie Jamison

97. “Pain that gets performed is still pain.”

— Leslie Jamison

98. “That the hardship facilitates a shared solitude, an utter isolation that has been experienced before, by others, and will be experienced again, that these others are present in spirit even if the wilds have tamed or aged or brutalized or otherwise removed their bodies.”

— Leslie Jamison

99. “Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn’t, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life – like everyone else’s – holds more than I could ever possibly see.”

— Leslie Jamison

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

— Leslie Jamison