212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

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. It doesn't make you any better, or any worse. It doesn't change you at all, except for the split second when you imagine that day when you will be the one who has to ask.

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?

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.

Alfred said more people have died in LA gang conflicts than the troubles in Ireland. You'd never thought of it like that, which is his point: no one thinks of it like that.

In the Whole Wide World Museum, Grover visits "The Things You See in the Sky Room", and the room full of "Long Thin Things You Can Write With", where a carrot has mistakingly wound up, so he returns it to an elegant marble pedestal in the middle of the otherwise empty "Carrot Room". As Grover reaches the end of the exhibit, he wonders: "Where did they put everything else?" That's when he reaches the wooden door marked: "Everything Else". When he opens it, of course, it's just the exit.

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.

Don't assume the contours of another person's heart. Don't assume its desires.

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.

I am human: nothing human is alien to me.