Everything Must Go Quotes

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?’ asks Emily in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town. The answer, of course, is no. How could we? It’s all we’ve ever known. But contemplating the end can help.”
― Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World

“For Americans, the decade’s most notorious epidemic was one that never happened. In 1976, President Gerald Ford’s administration became convinced that an outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix, Maryland, would lead to an epidemic on the scale of 1918 and spent $135 million on vaccines. But the flu didn’t spread, uptake was poor and the government ended up paying out almost $100 million to victims of vaccine-related Guillain-Barré syndrome. In a real epidemic, flu is a greater risk factor than the vaccine but in 1976, the solution was worse than the problem. The fiasco was a major blow to pandemic preparedness.”
― Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World