The Deep Places Quotes

“If 400,000 cases of Lyme a year yielded 50,000 chronic cases, and if even only a few thousand of those were as bad as mine, then, over the accumulated years, tens of thousands of people had to be facing impossible challenges without the moneyed, highly educated advantages that helped us, barely, to survive.”
― Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery

“The doctor himself looked a bit like a forest creature, with a trim build and rounded cheeks that protruded slightly, like a squirrel with a nut or two socked away inside.”
― Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery

“Before sickness took me, I tended to assume this was because in a world with less everyday pain, the experience of suffering felt more outrageous, more unjust, than it did in a world where pain was too ubiquitous to be concealed or filtered out of everyday experience. And I still think there’s something to this idea, since entering a permanent-seeming sickness did seem like an impossible outrage to my modern self at first—like some sort of ridiculous bureaucratic mistake. But what I learned from my illness is that chronic suffering can make belief in a providential God, if you have such a thing going in, feel essential to your survival, no”
― Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery