David Stuart MacLean > Quotes

“You’ve done a good job of saying everything but how you feel,” she said. “Sadness isn’t something you get to get out of by being smart. You don’t get to outwit this. You will have to deal with the pain at some point.”
― David Stuart MacLean, The Answer to the Riddle is Me

“... it made me realize how crazy random it was not just that I was me (the billion sperm to one egg; the insane odds against all of my ancestors ever meeting each other), but also how, with the millions of electrical pulses in the brain that were needed to fire every microsecond, it was incredibly random that I continued to be me.”
― David Stuart MacLean, The Answer to the Riddle is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia

“In the chaos of this world, where we carom and collide in the everyday turbulence, there's something about the specific gravity of the helpless individual, the lost and the fractured, that draws kindness from us, like venom from a wound.”
― David Stuart MacLean

“Nothing is as unsettling as people who have a healthy perspective on things.”
― David Stuart MacLean, How I Learned to Hate in Ohio

“Prior to World War II, German scientists developed a synthetic version of quinine, but didn’t use it because of its toxic side effects. Towards the end of the war, American scientists developed the same synthetic (corroborated by data found after the Allies captured Tunis). The Americans christened it chloroquine. This new drug was highly effective in preventing malaria, and people used it liberally, regardless of its toxic effects. Brazil even fortified table salt with it, which might sound extreme, but at the same time used similar logic as the United States’ widespread use of antibiotics in livestock. The problem, though, was that malaria is tenacious. Soon chloroquine-resistant strains of malaria began to appear.”
― David Stuart MacLean, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia

“The thing that gets in the way of people writing is what they want to write about. Because they'll start writing, and they'll get angry at the thing that they're writing because it wasn't what was in their head. One of the things you have to do in writing is get over the thing that brought you to the chair. The thing that brought you to the chair is great and really wonderful, but at some point you have to give over to the practice of what you've written versus what you want to write. What you want to write is going to destroy you. What you have written is the thing you've got.”
― David Stuart MacLean