Leslie Jamison Quotes

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

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

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

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?

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.

Freedom from one man is just another one.