“Whether plagues are managed quickly doesn't just depend on hardworking doctors and scientists. It depends on people who like to sleep in on weekends and watch movies and eat French fries and do the fantastic common things in life, which is to say, it depends on all of us. Whether a civilization fares well during a crisis has a great deal to do with how the ordinary, nonscientist citizen responds. A lot of the measures taken against plagues discussed in this book will seem stunningly obvious. You should not, for instance, decide diseased people are sinners and burn them at a literal or metaphorical stake, because it is both morally monstrous and entirely ineffective. But them a new plague crops up, and we make precisely the same mistakes we should have learned from three hundred years ago.”
― Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
― Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
“There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.”
― People of the Whale
― People of the Whale
“Surrounded by stone, this body of mine is seen in the dim light for what it is, fragile and brief. The water closes, seamless, around me. My foot with it's blue-green veins is vulnerable beside this rock-hard world that wants to someday take me in. Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves.”
― Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
― Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
“What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it.”
― Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
― Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World
Joss’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Joss’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Joss
Lists liked by Joss



























