I think of empathy as a set of cumulative effects, ideally - that it can be a force shaping your habits, shaping where you put your attention and then - if you're hard on yourself, in good ways - pushing you to translate that attention into action, on whatever scale.

Leslie Jamison

Categorized in : Thinking Attention Empathy

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.

Leslie Jamison

knowing imagination mean

Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us — a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain — it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.

Leslie Jamison

empathy choices brain

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

Leslie Jamison

trauma boundaries life

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood.

Leslie Jamison

yield pain blood

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

Leslie Jamison

commonality hurt

When bad things happened to other people, I imagined them happening to me. I didn’t know if this was empathy or theft.

Leslie Jamison

theft empathy people

The global phenomenon of poverty tourism - or 'poorism' - has become increasingly popular during the past few years. Tourists pay to be guided through the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of South Africa. The recently opened Los Angeles Gang Tour carries visitors through battle-scarred territories of urban violence and deprivation.

Leslie Jamison

battle past years

I've been thinking so much about writing as a gift to readers - and how newness of subject (place or topic or person) is one of the biggest gifts at our disposal.

Leslie Jamison

topics writing thinking

Imagining someone else's pain with too much surety can be as damaging as failing to imagine it.

Leslie Jamison

failing pain too-much

It's one of the most liberating things I experience in writing - letting yourself get rid of a gesture or character or plot point that always nagged, even if you couldn't admit to yourself that it did.

Leslie Jamison

plot writing character

I'm happy not knowing. Most of the time (except when I'm a neurotic mess about uncertainty) I feel glad that the horizon is a mystery.

Leslie Jamison

horizon anxiety knowing

Empathy requires knowing that you know nothing.

Leslie Jamison

empathy knowing knows

Whenever I've been stuck on a project, it's always brought me solace to the return to books that moved me in the past. It's a nice way to get outside my own head; and it brings me back to one of the most important reasons I write at all: to bring some pleasure to readers, to make them think or feel.

Leslie Jamison

nice writing book

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely for the sake of those age-old verities of truth and beauty.

Leslie Jamison

age answers might

The publishing industry, unsurprisingly, is full of different people who love different things and express that love in different languages. Find the people, the editors and agents, with whom you share some language, and some sense of what makes literature worth reading.

Leslie Jamison

editors reading people

I've been lucky enough to work with extraordinary teachers along the way, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with graduate students at SNHU. I'm just as excited for what I'll learn from them.

Leslie Jamison

lucky teacher way

We don't want to be wounds ("No, you're the wound!") but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be something more than just another girl who has one. We should be able to do these things without failing the feminism of our mothers, and we should be able to represent women who hurt without walking backward into a voyeuristic rehashing of the old cultural models.

Leslie Jamison

girl hurt mother

I like thinking of the writer as a kind of curator; the collection as curiosity cabinet - in a non-demeaning, non-objectifying sense - but an array, a set of offerings.

Leslie Jamison

curiosity offering thinking

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

Leslie Jamison

melting drunk chocolate

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

Leslie Jamison

our-actions empathy might