Megan Hex

“Over two thousand Byzantine manuscripts devoted to medical works survive in European libraries. A third of these contain works by a single author such as the second-century Galen of Pergamon; the remaining manuscripts have selections from different classical and Byzantine medical writers. In this second group of manuscripts, scattered among the selections culled from treatises by well-known physicians, are many anonymous antidotaria—lists of pharmaceutical treatments for specific diseases, some as long as eighty-five folios.”
― Timothy S. Miller, Walking Corpses: Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West

“If she asked Father Josiah, he would tell her to ask for forgiveness for Abu Zaidoun—she never would. If she asked God or Saint George the Martyr or the ghost of her son, they would tell her she didn’t need to ask forgiveness for Abu Zaidoun. She was fully entitled to seek revenge because it would strengthen her faith and give her ailing spirit the energy it needed to keep on living.”
― Ahmed Saadawi, Frankenstein in Baghdad

“The telephone, though a remarkable device, is not designed for real communication, for the heavy lifting of personal interaction. For the big stuff, you have to be in the same physical space. Questions are asked and answered on a chemical level: Our species lived and loved and dealt with each other for millions of years before we developed language. It’s still only ever background music.”
― Michael Marshall Smith, The Intruders

“All of that requires that they do what you’re talking about: destroying our empathy and reducing our faith in reason. Those guys on the border laughed when they let you through because you’re not even human to them. You’re a unit of something else. They rename you ‘test subject’ or ‘enemy,’ or they assign you a race or a nation or a class—and then they don’t have to think about you anymore.”
― Jeremy Robert Johnson, The Loop