Rachel Lee

“Microbes challenge my very understanding of myself- what am "I," in the end, if half of me isn't me, and the half of me that isn't me dictates some of "my" thinking and feeling? What does it mean to be a person whose consciousness, whose love and longing and fear, can be snuffed out by an overgrowth of bacteria that neither love nor long nor fear? How absurd that I can be murdered by that venomous little atom!”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Cal watched his brother triumph over sins he had never committed.”
― John Steinbeck

“I have never known how to love something in moderation.”
― Amy Lin, Here After

“History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events. Divorce may be an event, but it almost always results from a lengthy process—and the same could be said for birth, or battle, or infection. Similarly, much of what some imagine as dichotomous turns out to be spectral, from neurodivergence to sexuality, and much of what appears to be the work of individuals turns out to be the work of broad collaborations. We love a narrative of the great individual whose life is shot through with major events and who turns out to be either a villain or a hero, but the world is inherently more complex than the narratives we impose upon it, just as the reality of experience is inherently more complex than the language we use to describe that reality.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection