Lily

“I am highly suspicious of attempts to brightside human suffering, especially suffering that—as in the case of almost all infectious diseases—is unjustly distributed. I’m not here to criticize other people’s hope, but personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about the silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith called “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” The poem begins, “all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.” As in Ibn Battuta’s Damascus, the only path forward is true solidarity—not only in hope, but also in lamentation.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Despair isn't very productive. That's the problem with it. Like a replicating virus, all despair can make is more of itself.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“I do not fear death. I fear suffering. And I fear old age, though less so now that I am witnessing the tranquil and pleasant old age of my father. I am afraid of frailty, and of the absence of love. But death does not alarm me. It did not scare me when I was young, and I thought at the time that this was because it was such a remote prospect. But now, at sixty, the fear has yet to arrive. I love life, but life is also struggle, suffering, pain. I think of death as akin to a well-earned rest.”
― Carlo Rovelli, L'ordine del tempo