212 Quotes by Leslie Jamison

Empathy is a kind of care but it’s not the only kind of care, and it’s not always enough.

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?

She was scared about leaving everything, and I got that, but I also knew you couldn't start living in the new place until you said fuck-all to the old.

... fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst. So you eventually start wanting the worst possible thing to happen—finding your wife in bed with another man, or watching the worm finally come into the light. Until the worst happens, it always might happen. When it actually does happen? Now, at least, you know.

Pain without cause is a pain we can't trust. We assume it's been chosen or fabricated.

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Loneliness seeks out metaphors not just for definition but for the companionship of resonance, the promise of kinship in comparison.

It was a look that suggested emotions happening just past your line of sight: a grief so deep you'd never be able to see it, a love so fierce it could swallow itself completely.

Every paradise is made possible by blindness.