Make It Scream, Make It Burn Quotes

“The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universe, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it - through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of "leaving" aren't the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms - the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“For years I'd been an expert at longing, an expert at loving from the state of not-quite-having, an expert at daydreaming and sinking back into the plush furniture of cinematic imagining.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Every paradise is made possible by blindness.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“[...] one more definition of love: committing to a story you can't fully imagine when it begins.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Representing people always involves reducing them, and calling a project "done" involves making an uneasy truce with that reduction. But some part of me rails against that compression. Some part of me wants to keep saying: there's more, there's more, there's more.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“I wanted to tell you: the world is full of stories. I wanted to tell you: Baby, I've seen such incredible things in this life. You weren't a baby yet. You were a possibility. But I wanted to tell you that every person you'd ever meet would hold an infinite world inside. It was one of the only promises I could make to you in good conscience.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point - the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it, and sometimes you just do what you can. It doesn't make you any better, or any worse. It doesn't change you at all, except for the split second when you imagine that day when you will be the one who has to ask.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“It was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things—people, programs, systems of belief—than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn't, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life - like everyone else's - holds more than I could ever possibly see.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Everyone talks about weddings as beginnings but the truth is they are also endings. They give a horizon of closure to things that have been slowly dissolving for years: flirtations, friendships, shared innocence, shared rootlessness, shared loneliness.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Don't assume the contours of another person's heart. Don't assume its desires.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“When my parents first separated, my father had moved into a dark apartment in a corporate-looking building facing a grove of eucalyptus trees. I remember he got an ice-cream maker so we could make ice cream together. I remember the ice cream tasted like ice crystals. I remember finding a photograph of a beautiful woman with a blurry face on his dresser. I remember thinking the whole place felt incredibly lonely. I remember feeling sorry for him.

Months later, when he told me he was getting married, to a woman I hadn't yet met, I thought of the woman in the photograph and realised that his loneliness had lied to me. It wasn't his but mine, my own loneliness reflected in the cage of his new life, a space in which I felt I had no place.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Finding darkness in another story is so much less lonely than fearing the darkness is yours alone.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn’t, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life—like everyone else’s—holds more than I could ever possibly see.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Joe was right when he said that the whale is just a whale. And so was Leonora when she said the whale is everything. What if we grant the whale his whaleness, grant him furlough from our metaphoric employ, but still allow the contours of his second self - the one we've made - and admit what he's done for us?”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“This unknowing is one more definition of love: committing to a story you can't fully imagines when it begins.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“The ethical divide between showing up and coming back loomed large; it made me feel accused. This was respect, I thought: to look and keep looking, not to look away as soon as you'd gotten what you needed.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“They acknowledge that the realities closest to us - the rhythms of our lives, the people we love most - are shaped by forces beyond the edges of our sight.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Was it naïve or even ethically irresponsible to believe I should find common ground with everyone, or that it was even possible?”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Sometimes adoptive parents will go through a virtual pregnancy, using “birth clinics” or accessories called “tummy talkers,” package kits that supply a due date and body modifications, including the choice to make the growing fetus visible or not; as well as play-by-play announcements (“Your baby is doing flips!”) and the simulation of a “realistic delivery,” along with a newborn-baby accessory. For Second Life parents who go through pregnancy after adopting in-world, it’s usually with the understanding that the baby they are having is the child they have already adopted. The process is meant to give both parent and child the bond of a live birth. “Really get morning sickness,” one product promises. “Get aches.” Which means being informed that a body-that-is-not-your-corporeal-body is getting sick. “You have full control over your pregnancy, have it EXACTLY how you want,” this product advertises, which does seem to miss something central to the experience: that it subjects you to a process largely beyond your control.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“How does the morally outraged mind begin to arrange its materials? And then—once it begins to doubt itself—how does it rearrange them all over again?”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“In the Whole Wide World Museum, Grover visits "The Things You See in the Sky Room", and the room full of "Long Thin Things You Can Write With", where a carrot has mistakingly wound up, so he returns it to an elegant marble pedestal in the middle of the otherwise empty "Carrot Room". As Grover reaches the end of the exhibit, he wonders: "Where did they put everything else?" That's when he reaches the wooden door marked: "Everything Else". When he opens it, of course, it's just the exit.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“I am human: nothing human is alien to me.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Loneliness seeks out metaphors not just for definition but for the companionship of resonance, the promise of kinship in comparison.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“One definition of living might be the perpetual swapping of story lines. We trade in the scripts we've written for ourselves and get our real lives in return.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“And if Annie's work is fueled by love, then it's a form of love that doesn't blunt or distort her gaze. Her love sharpens her sight. Her work has helped me trust that an enduring emotional investment - even in all its mess and mistakes, because of its mess and mistakes - can help you see more acutely. It can sensitize your gaze to the competing vectors of emotional churning beneath ordinary moments.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“You thought the story kept changing, but the most important part never did. She was always just a woman in pain, sitting right in front of you. Sometimes it hurts just to stand. Sometimes a person needs help because she needs it, not because her story is compelling or noble or strange enough to earn it, and sometimes you just do what you can.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“Does graciousness mean you want to help - or that you don't, and do it anyway? The definition of grace is that it's not deserved. It does not require a good night's sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn