Yash Desai

“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

“I had to stop taking my
rheumatism medication when I first started taking the pills for my heart.

‘When it really comes down to it, it’s not a hard choice between your
heart and your joints, is it?’ the locum doctor had asked with a smile.

Dying of a heart attack probably wouldn’t be a bad way to go, I had time
to think, before he interrupted my thoughts.”
― Lisa Ridzén, When the Cranes Fly South

“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

“There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one. For most of us, that’s not a bad deal.”
― Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants