Hello and Welcome. This page is a collection of 8 quotes from Everything Is Tuberculosis book by John Green that I liked and saved while reading this book. I hope you will like these quotes too.
By the way, I am Deepak Kundu, an avid book reader, quotes collector and blogger.
Everything Is Tuberculosis Quotes
- Looking at history through any single lens creates distortions, because history is too complex for any one way of looking to suffice.
- While I’m fascinated by how TB shaped culture and history, what’s most important to me is how culture has shaped TB. The infection has long exploited human biases and blind spots, wriggling its way through the paths injustice creates. Of course, tuberculosis doesn’t know what it’s doing, but for centuries, the disease has used social forces and prejudice to thrive wherever power systems devalue human lives.
- The British Empire was in the business of resource extraction, and the systems built to support that business were resource-extraction systems. Were there schools? A few, to train servants of the empire. Were there clinics? A few, to heal servants of the empire.
- Tuberculosis is, on many levels, a weird disease. Infections can lie dormant for decades, or for a lifetime. The illness has an unpredictable course – it may kill its victims within a few months, or over many years, or not at all. Treatment can appear effective only for the illness to come roaring back for reasons we still don’t fully understand.
- We like to know why things happen, especially why really bad things happen. And if a reason is not immediately apparent, we will find one.
- Cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.
- Like all chronic illnesses that involve high levels of perceived peril, TB has been heavily stigmatized throughout history, and continues to be. Today, TB is often seen as a mark of disgrace because of its association with poverty, but it’s also often associated with perceived choice and moral failures.
- Around half the cells in my body do not, in fact, belong to my body – they are bacteria and other microscopic organisms colonizing me. And to one degree or another, these microorganisms can also control the body – shaping the body’s contours by making it gain or lose weight, sickening the body, killing the body. There’s even emerging evidence that one’s microbiome may have a relationship with thought itself through the gut-brain information axis, meaning that at least some of my thoughts may belong not to me, but to the microorganisms in my digestive tract.