212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

Nights out turned into endless calculations: How many glasses of wine has each person at this table had? What’s the most of anyone? How much can I take, of what’s left, without taking too much? How many people can I pour for, and how much can I pour for them, and still have enough left to pour for myself? How long until the waiter comes back and how likely is it someone else will ask him for another bottle?

It wasn’t likely I would die. Dave didn’t know that then. Prayer isn’t about likelihood anyway, it’s about desire – loving someone enough to get on your knees and ask for her to be saved. When he cried in that chapel, it wasn’t empathy – it was something else. His kneeling wasn’t a way to feel to my pain but to request that it end. – p19.

I didn’t enjoy what was happening but I enjoyed who I was while I was watching it. It offered evidence of my own inclination toward empathy.

This is part of what we disdain about sweeteners, the fact that we can taste without consequences. Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of inscription – insisting we can read tallies of sloth and discipline inscribed across the body itself – and artificial sweeteners threaten this legibility. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication.

We watch a character define himself entirely through what he will not claim. If I could choose one item from my entire apartment, what would I disown? It might be my trash can full of ripped paper packets, which might mean that this pile of packets is my most honest expression of self.

And if Annie’s work is fueled by love, then it’s a form of love that doesn’t blunt or distort her gaze. Her love sharpens her sight. Her work has helped me trust that an enduring emotional investment – even in all its mess and mistakes, because of its mess and mistakes – can help you see more acutely. It can sensitize your gaze to the competing vectors of emotional churning beneath ordinary moments.

Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies.

Is it wrong to call it empathy when you trust the face of suffering, but not the source? How do I inhabit someone’s pain without inhabiting their particular understanding of that pain?

Why do I hunger for significant barometers but find myself tethered to banality instead?