Yash Desai

“For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“A few quotes to entice you:

"I never used to do this, dwelling on things and getting myself all worked up, but every single part of my life is delicate now. I feel a sudden fondness for the old man in the mirror. It's not bloody easy, being human."

“Young folks today just aren’t right; they race about like they’ve only got a week left to live.”

“Abandon her? Which of us has been abandoned, I want to ask. You’re not the one stuck with a lifetime’s worth of memories in a body that’s slowly withering away.”

“How can it be better for me when it’s not what I want?’ My voice breaks. I’m so damn tired of everyone else deciding what’s best for me.”

“No one has ever told me that it’s normal for a person’s eyes to well up so easily as they age, for the tears to find a foothold in virtually every memory.”
― Lisa Ridzén, When the Cranes Fly South

“In breathing, as in everything in life, the numbers are staggering – indeed fantastical. Every time you breathe, you exhale some 25 sextillion (that’s 2.5 × 1022) molecules of oxygen – so many that with a day’s breathing you will in all likelihood inhale at least one molecule from the breaths of every person who has ever lived.1 And every person who lives from now until the sun burns out will from time to time breathe in a bit of you. At the atomic level, we are in a sense eternal.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants