AThousand_PaperCranes

“Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Scars are not shameful, not unless you let them be. If you do not wear them, they will wear you.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“H appears no different from the corpses already here. But H is different. She has made three sick people well. She has brought them extra time on Earth. To be able as a dead person to make a gift of this magnitude is phenomenal. Most people don't manage this sort of thing while they're alive. Cadavers like H are the dead's heroes.

It is astounding to me and achingly sad that with 80,000 people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more than half the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, our loved one's lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart but heartless is the last thing you'd call her.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“Trying to understand anything Callum Clem did was a recipe for madness. He read like an old poem; everything could be expected to have three meanings or none at all.”
― M.J. Kuhn, Among Thieves