Carolina

“I started to feel strange—not guilty per se, but somehow responsible for her suffering. I felt as though she were a stranger I had hit with my car, and I was waiting for her to die so she wouldn’t be able to identify me. When she talked, it was like I was watching a movie.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Lucía has made me feel things I’ve forgotten, like mercy. It’s no longer silent dynamite, but something else; it’s like a new heart, beating inside the old one.”
― Agustina Bazterrica, The Unworthy

“And so here is Shreya, saying “Polo” to me from across the great divide. But she is also saying “Marco.” She is also telling me to hear her voice, and answer her call. People often ask me why I’m obsessed with tuberculosis. I’m a novelist, not a historian of medicine. TB is rare where I live. It doesn’t affect me. And that’s all true. But I hear Shreya, and Henry, and so many others calling to me: Marco. Marco. Marco.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“The consumptive poet cannot be in the snow, only lying in the house in the snow. For me, anyway, this way of understanding chronic illness--as being of the world but also no permitted by circumstances or the social order to be entirely WITH the world--is a sentiment applied from within rather than from without, a way of thinking about the limits and opportunities of disability that acknowledges the difference and loss without othering or romanticizing. It's not trustful or loving or soothing or mild. It's true.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection