Enjoy memories, yes, but don‘t be a slave to who you wish you once had been. Those memories aren‘t alive. You are.

Memories are fossils, the bones left by dead versions of ourselves. More potently, our minds are a hungry audience, craving only the peaks and valleys of experience. The bland erodes, leaving behind the distinctive bits to be remembered again and again.

You can‘t taste a memory without tainting it with who you have become.

Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with.

Death‘s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.

It‘s strange how quickly the significance of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It‘s strange how close love and fear live to each other.

We do not appreciate abstractions, they argued, without direct experience with the substances that form them.

We never really know what we do to each other, with each other, for each other.

The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn‘t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who‘s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that‘s probably because it‘s full of shit.

We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.

So it needs saying from the outset that it‘s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.

If a form of language cues you to have an instant emotional response while also halting you from asking further questions, or makes you feel “chosen” just for showing up, or allows you to morally divorce yourself from some one-dimensionally inferior other, it‘s language worth challenging.

The water behind a boat is the deepest wishing well in the world: It has drag and intention. Throw your dreams into it. If they don‘t pull you in and drown you, perhaps they‘ll come true.

When our personal belief that we are not enough collides with our professional belief that we‘re not doing enough, we can feel like we‘re coming apart at the seams.

As you care for people with your heart wide open, you often don‘t realize how much of what you‘re exposed to is being taken in and held in your body. It isn‘t until later that your body starts to let you know.

Oppression thrives on misunderstanding, alienation, and us/them binaries.

Treatment focuses upon the patient‘s needs; experimentation focuses upon the researchers‘ needs, no matter how much those researchers may invoke possible or future benefits for patients.

What correlates very closely to most “racial” differences in life expectancy, mortality, disease susceptibility, and survival is the race to which one is perceived as belonging.

By focusing upon the single event of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study rather than examining a centuries-old pattern of experimental abuse, recent investigations tend to distort the problem, casting African Americans‘ wariness as an overreaction to a single event rather than an understandable, reasonable reaction to the persistent experimental abuse that has characterized American medicine‘s interaction with African Americans.

People expect a story to always mean the same thing, but I have found that stories change like people do.

Live long enough and you‘ll forget almost everything you thought you‘d always remember.

It turns out that everyone benefits when society meets the needs of the disadvantaged.

Dehumanize the group, and you have completed the work of dehumanizing any single person within it.

To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one‘s own species.

It is a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for as long as slavery lasted on its soil. No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved. That will not come until the year 2111.

The thing is, women are revered straight into abjection, useful only as a totem of inspiration. When we go to make that work our own, we are unable to survive in the industry the men built, the one they sell our wares within.

No one ever tells you how lonely being a woman who is dedicated to her career, either by choice or necessity, will be....Worse yet are the women who find your career to be a commentary on their failures or ambitions, or see you as some kind of competition, and that equation has never made sense to me.

And, anyway, I‘ve learned from previous experiences that if someone values you only when you‘re about to walk out the door, you should definitely keep walking.

Poverty and inequality breed an unsettled nature in a person. And they breed something very dangerous and insidious in the powerful men who write the contracts with biases that they will never admit they have as they continue to decide how this world gets to go.

I had watched people who loved the work as much as I did get turned inside out on a daily basis, only to be used up and barely wrung our before they were used up again, with no consideration for their young hearts. I was supposed to be fine with how their eagerness to learn and their willingness to work hard were exploited.

What happens when there is only duty? What happens when your task is your identity, your entire universe the span of your arms?

Without the clash and clang of metal bashing against metal, the grinding of gears, the whip crack of snapped cables, the violence assumed an almost surreal quality. Her eyes had ridden to war, yet her ears were at peace.

...the purpose of pain isn‘t to prevent one from doing as one wishes but to ensure one does as others wish

You can work as hard as you like, and plan as carefully as you want, but there are moments when it‘s just about a hunch, about trusting your instincts, or about fate.

Just because you don‘t know why you‘ve come, doesn‘t mean you shouldn‘t be here. We often find purpose where we least expect it - or not.

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”

The belief that public health measures are not intended for people like us is widely held by many people like me.

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity...

Pathogens have no boundaries; they are the ultimate travelers; they go wherever there‘s human fuel. We First Worlders have become far too complacent in the idea that disease, especially NTDs [neglected tropical diseases], can be quarantined to the Third World, and that we can live safely in our communities supposedly gated against pathogens, ignoring the suffering of the poor and sick in faraway lands.

The annals of medicine are full of accounts of diseases that sound like no disease known today, but that once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come.

She explained. She elaborated. She scolded. She demurred. She even laughed. Ultimately, she conquered.

Single women are helping the world get used to working women.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one‘s ability to persuade.