Emily

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

“Of course I was being sincere, but you can be sincere and be wrong, or in any case you can persuade yourself that you’re wrong as sincerely as you persuaded yourself to the contrary. “Nine Columns for an Italian Magazine”
― Emmanuel Carrère, 97,196 Words: Essays

“To read these multiple images we must learn to suffer the ridiculous image to disclose itself within the tragic, the mythic in the trivial, the ironic in the poignant. You do not read Ulysses; you watch the words. (“Joyce’s Forest of Symbols”)”
― Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays

“And so we must remember that illness is not only a biomedical phenomenon, but also a constructed one, and how we imagine leprosy or OCD or tuberculosis matters.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection