Pasty Hag

“As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between. These are the terms of our existence. The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach. To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I
currently have.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“EVERYONE WHO IS born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
― Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

“The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universe, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it - through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen. These forms of "leaving" aren't the opposite of authentic presence. They are simply one of its symptoms - the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance, and faith contains doubt.”
― Leslie Jamison, Make It Scream, Make It Burn

“One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don’t believe it’s true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking.”
― Susan Sontag, Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview