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“Your brain is recognizing a pattern that it has flagged with life-or-death importance, and it reflexively shoots out what it believes to be the appropriate response… None of this of course is reasonable or rational. But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life.”
― What My Bones Know
― What My Bones Know
“But the sadness of a lost childhood feels like yearning, impossible desire. It feels like a hollow, insatiable hunger.”
― What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
― What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
“We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.”
― Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
― Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
“On my first day of training, she told me, "Death is natural. Children dying is natural. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world." Treating disease, whether through herbs or magic or drugs, is unnatural. No other animals do it, at least not with anything approaching our sophistication. Hospitals are unnatural. As are novels, and saxophones. None of us actually wants to live in a natural world.”
― Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
― Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
Avriel’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Avriel’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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