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The Anthropocene Reviewed QUOTES

The Anthropocene Reviewed QUOTES

1 " Years earlier, in a video about world history, I’d speculated about what might happen “if some superbug shows up tomorrow and it travels all these global trade routes.” In 2019, I’d said on a podcast, “We all must prepare ourselves for the global pandemic we all know is coming.” And yet, I did nothing to prepare. The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

2 " It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us. But mostly, I think I'm just scared that if I show the world my belly, it will devour me. And so I wear the armor of cynicism, and hide behind the great walls of irony, and only glimpse beauty with my back turned to it... "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

3 " One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

4 " Almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

5 " You'll Never Walk Alone' is cheesy, but it's not wrong. The song doesn't claim the world is a just or happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hope in our hearts. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

6 " We are, in spite of it all, a charismatic species. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

7 " There was so much news. News that was forever breaking, that there was never time for context. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

8 " These days, after drinking from the internet's fire hose for thirty years, I've begun to feel more of those negative effects. I don't know if it's my age, or the fact that the internet is no longer plugged into the wall and now travels with me everywhere I go, but I find myself thinking of that Wordsworth poem that begins, "The world is too much with us; late and soon. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

9 " What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of RNA?[...]the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

10 " We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

11 " All of life is dependent upon other life, and the closer we consider what constitutes living, the harder life becomes to define. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

12 " I'm not sure why I find it beautiful to devote oneself obsessively to the creation of something that doesn't matter, but I do. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

13 " First impressions do matter. Especially when they are likely to also be final impressions. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

14 " For me, reading and rereading are an everlasting apprenticeship. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

15 " I...took some pride in 'not fulfilling my potential,' in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn't actually have that much potential. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

16 " ... I called my brother, Hank, and told him I was feeling frightened. Hank is the levelheaded one, the sane one, the calm one. He always has been. We have never let the fact of my being older get in the way of Hank being the wise older brother. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

17 " When we tell those stories to people in chronic pain, or those living with incurable illness, we often end up minimizing their experience. We end up expressing our doubt in the face of their certainty, which only compounds the extent to which pain separates the person experiencing it from the wider social order. The challenge and responsibility of per-
sonhood, it seems to me, is to recognize personhood in others-to listen to others' pain and take it seriously, even when you yourself cannot feel it. That capacity for listening, I think, really does separate human life from the quasi-life of an enterovirus. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

18 " I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on the lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

19 " ...facts still don’t slow down conspiracy theories. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed

20 " Pay attention to what you pay attention to. "

― John Green , The Anthropocene Reviewed