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“According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.
Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.”
― The Fault in Our Stars
Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.”
― The Fault in Our Stars
“As my friend Ed puts it: “When you join a church you’re just picking which hot mess is your favorite.”
― Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
― Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.”
― On Being Ill
― On Being Ill
Rachel’s 2025 Year in Books
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