212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

Another person’s pain registers as an experience in the perceiver: empathy as forced symmetry, a bodily echo.

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.

I wanted to tell you: the world is full of stories. I wanted to tell you: Baby, I’ve seen such incredible things in this life. You weren’t a baby yet. You were a possibility. But I wanted to tell you that every person you’d ever meet would hold an infinite world inside. It was one of the only promises I could make to you in good conscience.

It was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things – people, programs, systems of belief – than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.

You can reclaim some things once you’re ready; they’ve been waiting for you patiently. But some things are just lost for good.

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.

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.

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.

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.