Parasites Like Us Quotes

“But I held her in my heart, and would stay with her all my days, even if a great many of them were trying ones. If love dictated only in Russian, I would learn that thorny tongue.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“The successful forms of life are the parasites, the ones who bleed their environment to optimal exploitation, who stunt everything by taking a lion’s share, who leave their hosts alive but shriveled. We”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“I had a vision of the afterlife of Homo sapiens: I saw a galactic ice sheet so vast and barren that, stumbling through the cold, you might only encounter another soul once in a lifetime. But this is eternity, a billion lifetimes, and though you walk endlessly alone, eventually you’ll cross paths with everyone you lost touch with, every person who stood beside you in a grocery line, every distant uncle and forgotten friend, every human that’s ever been. You walk and walk and fall and walk again, and when, at last, you near the warmth of another human heart, regardless of their race or language, age or appearance, you clutch them for all you’re worth. The”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“If you don’t know what became of someone, if you don’t attend a person’s funeral or hear word from a friend of a friend, these persons who float from our lives attain a kind of immortality, always hovering around the next corner. By closing your eyes, you can attach to them any set of attributes: the various chairs he reclines in, the soda she might sip from, the dreams they have of you they can’t remember in the morning. This brings me to life’s great paradox: for someone to truly be a part of you – to live in your thoughts, roaming your memory and vision, occupying planes of hope, nostalgia, and speculation in your mind – he or she must be wholly inaccessible to you. Twin”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“If there are ghosts on this earth, they are formed by the things you cannot utter, and they’ll outlive the black in your teeth, burn hotter than any hole in your stomach. Untold stories take on lives of their own. They silently eat dinner with you. Still as shoe trees, they stand over you, watching you sleep. They’ll make you pace all-night”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“I’ve said enough on the topic already; suffice it to say that, over the last million years, the fates of the cultures of the world have always been the same: dust. Anthropologists don’t erase cultures; we remember them.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“But this process took many years, and the culprit was an all-star team: smallpox, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, typhoid, rubella, measles, and mumps.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“When Europeans colonized this hemisphere, 93 percent of the indigenous population died, from the tip of Chile to the Hudson Bay.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“If the history of humanity has been the history of extinguishing other forms of life, it’s hard to say whether we have been evolving.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“It is a common mistake for people to believe they live in times of great change, and it can only be vanity to think your lives, compared with the last several million years of humanity, are of great account. And take heart in the knowledge that only a fool thinks he knows when his life has reached its high and its low.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“And I’ll have you know, from direct observation, that a billionaire is the most loathsome thing on earth. It’s a person who uses for himself the resources of a thousand others. Worst of all, this wealth makes him think he doesn’t need other people, no matter who they are.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“to live when others do not, we were to learn, isn’t survival, but being left behind.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“The more you learned about life, the more it seemed an engine of little design, and to survive its queer lottery was what we called living.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“It was easy not to think about the grim work that went on twenty-four hours a day in the meat factory below. The simplest thing in the world was not to visualize the hydraulic slaughter line or picture the busy air knives and cauterizing belts.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“The Clovis appeared at the end of the last Ice Age, inaugurating an era of warmth that ushered in agriculture, the birth of civilization, and the ascendancy of Homo sapiens. But the Clovis simply plundered the first sunny days of humanity, just as we, a thousand years overdue for the next Ice Age, were plundering the last.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“A zoo is where you store animals that are going extinct. Sticking an animal in a zoo means you’ve given up on it.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“This brings me to life’s great paradox: for someone to truly be a part of you—to live in your thoughts, roaming your memory and vision, occupying planes of hope, nostalgia, and speculation in your mind—he or she must be wholly inaccessible to you.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“If you don’t know what became of someone, if you don’t attend a person’s funeral or hear word from a friend of a friend, these persons who float from our lives attain a kind of immortality, always hovering around the next corner.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“I knew about bourbon—it was part of the reason I was never invited on the lecture circuit anymore. Another couple sips, and it would start to gruff your voice. Then it would muss your hair, pull your shirttails out, and finally settle into your real soft spots—ego, adolescent urges, and the fear that at any moment your fraud would be discovered.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“Of the twin fallacies of humanity,” I continued, “the first is that people invariably believe they live in times of great change and significance.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us

“Certainly, technology improves, but the state of being human is constant.”
― Adam Johnson, Parasites Like Us