93 Quotes by Eula Biss

What a dazzlingly generous, gloriously unpredictable book! Maggie Nelson shows us what it means to be real, offering a way of thinking that is as challenging as it is liberating. She invites us to 'pay homage to the transitive' and enjoy 'a becoming in which one never becomes.' Reading The Argonauts made me happier and freer.

I thought, how would I feel if my son gave one of those [underprivileged] kids chicken pox? For him it's not a terrible thing. We have good insurance and easy access to health care. It's a different situation for another family. I didn't want to make the decision for them.

A trust-in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong-captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child.

Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.

An apology is also an admission of guilt.

However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other’s environment. Immunity is a shared space – a garden we tend together.

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 kind of 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, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century.

And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word ‘natural.’ This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What ‘natural’ has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is ‘pure’ and ‘safe’ and ‘benign’. But the use of ‘natural’ as a synonym for ‘good’ is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.