Emma

“And no one knew what I was missing
until a doctor gave me a handful of Lego
and said to put a brick on the table
every time I heard a sound.
After the test I still held enough bricks
in my hand to build a house
and call it my sanctuary,
call it the reason I sat in saintly silence
during my grandfather's sermons when he preached
The Good News I only heard
as Babylon's babbling echoes.”
― Raymond Antrobus, The Perseverance

“But the stars aren’t eternal. Most were already dead, and I was looking at ghosts.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“But survival is not primarily an act of individual will, of course. It's an act of collective will.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection