Jeremiah Shirk

“We cannot think another’s thoughts, but we can feel their pain. Also, their pleasure, but we focus on pain because pain threatens us. We turn our eyes and block our ears and pretend it is not ours to feel. We let our brains rule our bodies. Our brains tell us we cannot withstand all the feeling, that our bodies are not capable. But we have forgotten—I have forgotten—that we heal, not through logic, not through the brain, but through discharging energy. When we have a fever, we sweat and have fever dreams that make us writhe and cry out. When we eat something rotten, we heave and vomit and shit liquid. We absorb pain and anger through the body, and we must expel it through the body, like a virus, like rot. Can I lick myself clean? Can I scale my skin? Can I molt?”
― Nadia Owusu, Aftershocks

“Never before had I seen Homo sapiens so clearly—a species, at its most fundamental level, of storytellers. Creatures who overlay story on everything, but especially their own lives, and in so doing, can imbue a cold, random, sometime brutal existence, with fabricated meaning.”
― Blake Crouch, Upgrade