212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

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

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.

My loneliness was a full-time job.

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.

The unease of the tour is not the discomfort of being problematically present – South Central mediated by air-conditioning vents – so much as the discomfort of an abiding absence – a pattern of always being elsewhere, far away, our of ear- and eye- and gun-shot, humming beach to bistro along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Freedom from one man is just another one.

I tell myself I can agree with a declaration of pain without being certain I agree with the declaration of its cause.

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.

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