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 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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Empathy involves active engagement, including asking questions and understanding the broader context of someone's experiences.
This quote by Leslie Jamison highlights the depth of empathy, illustrating that it goes beyond mere listening. True empathy incorporates a desire to inquire and understand the complexities of another person's situation, recognizing that one’s perception is limited and that there is always more to learn about their context and emotions.
Themes
EmpathyListeningInquiryContextUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a workshop on emotional intelligence.
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.
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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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