Patrick

“The mutability of bacteria, coupled with their ability to pass around and share genetic trumps in a microscopic game of cards, seemed to increasingly leave Homo sapiens holding losing hands.”
― Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance

“What I will remember forever is that no one said a word. I am still amazed at the profoundness that can echo in silence. Each person, including newer boyfriends who I knew less well, gave me a reaffirming hug in turn and headed back to their seats. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my grief. They were there for me, just for a moment, and it was exactly what I needed.”
― David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

“A true patriot salutes the flag but always makes sure it’s flying over a nation that’s not only free but fair, not only strong but just.”
― Jon Meacham, Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation

“Caring deeply comes at a cost. The word compassion contains within itself its emotional price. The prefix com means “with”; the Latin root pati (from which we get the word passion as in the Passion of Christ) means “suffering.” To feel compassion, then, is to enter into another’s suffering, to suffer along with them. Carl Frederick Buechner, theologian and author, defines compassion as “the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside someone else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never be any peace and joy for me until there is finally peace and joy for you.”
― Sy Montgomery, Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell