Sapna Ramappa

“Meningitis, like the virus that caused it, wasn't a metaphor or a narrative device. It was just a disease.

But we are hardwired to look for patterns, to make constellations from the stars. There must be some logic to the narrative, some reason for the misery.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“I’ve spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my solar plexus that my life isn’t for anything, that it doesn’t mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of the ginkgo tree, I’m able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here—that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know. And most of all, I am here to be. To be not just on this planet, but with it. I am here to be with you, to be with my family, and even to be with this forest. The gift is being itself, and who better to show us that than the oldest lady in town.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“To accept the demonization of the marginalized as inevitable is to give up on the whole human enterprise.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“When we tell those stories to people in chronic pain, or those living with incurable illness, we often end up minimizing their experience. We end up expressing our doubt in the face of their certainty, which only compounds the extent to which pain separates the person experiencing it from the wider social order. The challenge and responsibility of per-
sonhood, it seems to me, is to recognize personhood in others-to listen to others' pain and take it seriously, even when you yourself cannot feel it. That capacity for listening, I think, really does separate human life from the quasi-life of an enterovirus.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet