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Leslie Jamison Quotes

Total quotes: 11
“I’ve always treasured empathy as the particular privilege of the invisible, the observers who are shy precisely because they sense so much—because it is overwhelming to say even a single word when you’re sensitive to every last flicker of nuance in the room.”
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Tagged: Empathy, Shy, Sensibility, Feelings, Sensitivity
“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 Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Tagged: Empathy, Listening
“My job title is medical actor, which means I play sick.”
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams: Essays
Tagged: first lines of books
“The lie wasn't that addiction could yield truth. The lie was that addiction had a monopoly on it.”
— Leslie Jamison, Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
Tagged: Addiction, Alcoholism, Recovery
“I mashed the lime in my vodka tonic and glimpsed — in the sweet spot between two drinks and three, then three and four, then four and five — my life as something illuminated from the inside.”
— Leslie Jamison, Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
Tagged: Addiction, Alcoholism
“Part of the fear of looking at the relationship between art and its financial context, perhaps, is the fear that something else is true as well: I am whatever these worlds paid me to be.”
— Leslie Jamison, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“I felt something else: initiated, aglow. The whole world stood accused: You never told me it felt this good.”
— Leslie Jamison, Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
Tagged: Alcohol, Substance Abuse, Addiction, Sobriety, Recovery, Creativity
“Lying could not bring this woman into being, but it could allow me to forget — for stretches at a time, at least — that she did not exist.”
— Leslie Jamison, Leslie Jamison On The Allure Of Lying
Tagged: lying
“What if we stopped thinking of money as the dirty secret of creative pursuit and instead recognized money as one of its constituent threads? Whether we like it or not, money's presence in art doesn't depend on whether we consider its presence. It's always already there anyway.”
— Leslie Jamison, Scratch
Tagged: Books, Money, Writers, Writers and money
“It was liberating to start imagining that there could be meaningful stories told about wreckage, sure, but also meaningful stories told about what it might mean to pull yourself out from under it: stories about showing up for work, for intimacy, for other people; stories about getting through ordinary days without drinking enough vodka to forget yourself entirely.”
— Leslie Jamison, Does Recovery Kill Great Writing?
Tagged: Addiction, Alcoholism, Recovery, Pain and Creativity, Addiction and Writing, Addiction and Creativity, Healing and Creativity
“This ruptured syllogism — If I understand myself, I’ll get better — made me question the way I’d come to worship self-awareness itself, a brand of secular humanism: Know thyself, and act accordingly. What if you reversed this? Act, and know thyself differently. Showing up for a meeting, for a ritual, for a conversation — this was an act that could be true no matter what you felt as you were doing it. Doing something without knowing if you believed it — that was proof of sincerity, rather than its absence.”
— Leslie Jamison, When I Drank, I Knelt on the Bathroom Floor to Throw Up. When I Got Sober, I Did it to Pray
Tagged: How To Think, Addiction, Recovery, prayer, Spirituality, Religion
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