Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

- Leslie Jamison

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 jus…

- Leslie Jamison

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 the…

- Leslie Jamison

Whatever we can’t hold, we hang on a hook that will hold it.

- Leslie Jamison

Though there might not be any easy answers to the problem of poverty, its most compelling scribes do not resign themselves to representation solely f…

- Leslie Jamison

I needed people to deliver my feelings back to me in a form that was legible. Which is a superlative kind of empathy to seek, or to supply: an empath…

- Leslie Jamison

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,…

- Leslie Jamison

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

- Leslie Jamison

Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writi…

- Leslie Jamison