Heather Wahlquist

“As Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

“I have to attend a party—and I say have to because that is my relationship with parties*—I usually research all the known attendees in advance.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Halley was brilliant. Here’s just one example of his use of lateral thinking, as discussed in John and Mary Gribbin’s book Out of the Shadow of a Giant: When asked to work out the acreage of land in every English county, Halley “took a large map of England, and cut out the largest complete circle he could from the map.” That circle equated to 69.33 miles in diameter. He then weighed both the circle and the complete map, concluding that since the map weighed four times more than the circle, the area of England was four times the area of the circle. His result was only 1 percent off from contemporary calculations.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet