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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of finding meaning and love even amidst pain and suffering.
Leslie Jamison's quote reflects on the human experience of pain and how our perception of it can be transformed. Rather than simply enduring suffering, she suggests that we must seek out moments of love and hope within that suffering, turning our hardships into something that can teach and guide us. It encourages a proactive mindset in the face of adversity, urging us to engage deeply with emotional experiences and find positivity even in difficult times.
Themes
PainLoveSufferingMeaningGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech discussing resilience during challenging times.
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.
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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.
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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
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 JamisonRead
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