Health and Safety Quotes

“Magazines often had to draw on the past to recall writers who could command cults of personality, in this case by literally following in the footsteps of bygone intellectuals, in a fury of longing for a time when writing was synonymous with celebrity and style, as opposed to now, when it was associated with obscurity and financial precarity.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“There is very little that can be done when a society decides that the only rule of life is to get yours, and that empathy, concern, and worry are for losers and chumps.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“He told me that if I was not out of the apartment by the thirtieth of August he would hack me. “I am extremely smart and talented with computers,” he wrote.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“relive this moment. I think I will forever. You can ruin your own life in an instant, by not paying attention.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“people on the coasts always had trouble computing that the people in the middle could live radical lives;”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“And isn’t a leader only a manifestation of a collective logic?”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“Being in love made me happy, and I lost interest in channeling all of my knowledge about nutrition, disease, and medicine into a life of perpetual risk management. The things I gave up during this time included jogging, daily flossing, omega-3 supplements, and the dire sense of professional competition that had given purpose to my solitude and driven my ambition.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“The images were dazzling but did not exist long enough to be recorded in memory, for that was the point, to cut them off before they would become constrained by the limitations of understanding.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“She had a beef tongue in the fridge from God knows where and told me how excited she was to prepare it for me for dinner. She would boil it, she said with excitement, then slice it with homemade mayonnaise. I was so lucky to have such a friend.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“a mythological Mediterranean childhood playing on rocky beaches in azure waters, breaking the salt crust off a grilled fish, learning from the nuns who took care of her after school to darn socks, and reading Russian fairy tales as a child and Homer as an adolescent in the liceo classico.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“The imaginary home invasion or an influx of people born in other countries was scarier than the real mass shootings that happened on a regular basis, or than the state-sanctioned murder of people by the police?”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“Americans loved an act of cheap, self-congratulatory patriotism as a cover for a botched response, for systemic failure.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“a system of revelation unique to my own limitations of consciousness.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown

“Falling in was one of the greatest risks of adult life, not much discussed—falling in to conspiracy, fanaticism, religion, and embarrassing beliefs, as life continued on and the weight of it broke people left and right.”
― Emily Witt, Health and Safety: A Breakdown