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

Commonality doesn't inoculate against hurt.

- 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

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

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

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