Jessica O

“We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.”
― Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

“I'm going to become whatever I was going to become.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
― Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

“There are some things you just do because it’s the right thing to do. And the outcome is out of my hands or in somebody else’s hands. I want to believe there’s value in that. You’re doing everything you can for the patient, but you’re not deluding yourself into thinking that what you do isn’t worth doing because the person is going to die anyway.”
― Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers