212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

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.

Sometimes we’re all trying to purge something. And what we’re trying to purge resists our purging.

The neglect here is almost unimaginable – and it’s not just neglect from the Beckley staff but from the world itself – the world that has carried on with its daily business while keeping all these men invisibly deposited elsewhere, in a slew of the nation’s most obscure corners. On the outside, you can think about prison for a moment and then you can think about something else.

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.

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.

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.

How does the morally outraged mind begin to arrange its materials? And then – once it begins to doubt itself – how does it rearrange them all over again?

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.

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