212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

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.

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.

When we criticize sentimentality, perhaps part of what we fear is the possibility that it allows us to usurp the texts we read, insert ourselves and our emotional needs too aggressively into their narratives, clog their situations and their syntax with our tears. Which brings us back to the danger that we’re mainly crying for ourselves, or at least to feel ourselves cry.

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

Pain that gets performed is still pain.

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.

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.

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

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. Sadness becomes a seizure. Empathy demands another kind of porousness in response.