A History of Present Illness Quotes

“I wonder, though—do you know a face if you know it only as a photograph? I read a philosopher once who railed against the projected world of perspective drawing, where you align all the edges of things to a single point in the infinite distance. This is considered realism, but in what way is this realistic? These landscapes, he said, have an air of decency, remain at a distance, do not involve or require the viewer. But this is not how the world appears when we encounter it in perception.”
― Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness: A Novel

“It doesn't matter just because it happened.”
― Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness

“How did that first life, that childhood, end? Hard to say how, and hard to say when. But I can tell you how I got out of town. Every book I read said you had to go to the city to see what the world really was. I applied to one college and I got in. In that interstitium, when I knew I was leaving but hadn’t yet gone, I felt for sure that I would die,”
― Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness: A Novel

“This fascination with disaster, both fear and fetish, I never quite outgrew. The truth is, you start to sort of wish for it. Like some Czech said: Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. Half the rush is wanting it. Wanting to get it over with.”
― Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness: A Novel