Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

by John Green

We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering.

The world we share is a product of all the worlds we used to share.

“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

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.

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.

We all engage in the punitive act of giving a disease a meaning.

We live in between what we choose and what is chosen for us.