Melissa Leonard

“The Church does not exist to condemn people but to bring about an encounter with the visceral love of God’s mercy.”
― Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy

“I began to realize that coming in such close contact with my own mortality had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Imagining someone as more than human does much the same work as imagining them as less than human: Either way, the ill are treated as fundamentally other because the social order is frightened by what their frailty reveals about everyone else’s.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them.”
― Turkish Proverbs