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 writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
Leslie JamisonRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Empathy is both an involuntary response and a conscious choice to connect with others.
This quote emphasizes that empathy is not merely a spontaneous reaction but also an intentional decision to engage and understand the feelings of others. It suggests that by consciously choosing to be empathetic, individuals can foster deeper connections and enrich their relationships, highlighting the importance of awareness and effort in cultivating understanding.
Themes
EmpathyChoiceConnectionAwarenessRelationships
In practice
Example use cases
In a team meeting, you could use this quote to encourage coworkers to be more understanding of each other's viewpoints.
More from Leslie Jamison
All quotes →When you're a writer and something difficult happens to you, one of the things involved in that is this emergence of narrative potential. And there's then a kind of self-consciousness about telling a story in which you suffered.
Leslie JamisonRead
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 JamisonRead
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 JamisonRead
I really believe in people putting stories out there that contain the most difficult moments because nothing to me is more lonely making than sanitized stories or airbrushed stories that kind of allied how hard it got.
Leslie JamisonRead
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For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.
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The first relative I came out to was my aunt Teri, a superior court judge in San Francisco. Her reaction surprised me. 'I've known you were gay for years,' she said. From that moment on I was comfortable in my own skin.
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I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
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Men are allowed to have passion and commitment for their work... a woman is allowed that feeling for a man, but not her work.
Barbra StreisandRead
A lot of black women still carry a lot of pain when they see black men with women who aren't black, and that's really unfortunate that that could make us so upset. It has to do with self esteem.
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Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.
Roger EbertRead