The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Leslie Jamison

Irony is easier than hopeless silence but braver than flight.

bravery, irony, silence

We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.

feelings, sentiment

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.

cliche, feelings, sentiment

Jim was the one who told me that my emotional life made him dangle his stethoscope like a snake charmer: my moods weren’t hard to see but they were hard to read, and even harder to diagnose. It was ostensibly a complaint, but I think he liked his metaphor, and liked that our moments of distance were subtle enough to require this kind of formulation. Meaning that I was a complex creature and so was he; that he became even more complex in his attempt to bridge the gap between our complexities; that he could create a complicated image to house this complex of complications. This is how writers fall in love: they feel complicated together and then they talk about it.

love, mood, relationships, writers

Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia – em (into) and pathos (feeling) – a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person’s pain as you’d enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?

empathy, pain, travel

I loved the full heat of being drunk, like I was made of melting chocolate and spreading in all directions.

drinking, drunk, drunken-behaviour, drunkenness

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.

blood, love, pain

Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.

protest, speech, theatre

Metaphors are tiny saviors leading the way out of sentimentality, small disciples of Pound, urging “Say it new! Say it new!” It’s hard for emotion to feel flat if its language is suitably novel, to feel excessive if its rendering is suitably opaque. Metaphors translate emotion into surprising and sublime language, but they also help us deflect and diffuse the glare of revelation.

metaphor, pound, sentimentality

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

That was a moment where something clarified about shame for me: it’s not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it’s pointing at something, some confusing blend of fear and desire. There was liberation in that, thinking of shame as something to follow, like a path—rather than simply something to be paralyzed by, or try to dissolve, or become second-level meta-shamed by (i.e. “I shouldn’t even be having this feeling of shame…”)

It’s easier, somehow, if there’s a reason for tragedy – lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There’s something we recognize as human, a motive toward which we can direct our rage but can also understand, at some primal level, as an extension of ourselves.

injustice, tragedy