Quarantine Life Quotes

I had a dream about you last night.. You were playing with chicken livers and told me everyone was in quarantine.

Unhappiness can be like a virus spreading from one person, to the next person, to the next one and so on. When someone is mean or rude to you, do not let their unhappiness infect your own life. If you are the unhappy one, please quarantine yourself so you do not infect others!

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

But I was still determined to protect her. It might be the one good thing I would ever do in my life. I wondered if God would even notice.

Grief is pervasive. It cannot be quarantined any more than love can be quarantined. Grief affects all areas of life.

In the quarantine isolation, I felt the warmth of your love, even though you can't touch me. I rest in peace with the warmth of love, faith and kindness of the humanity.

You walk around your kitchen and bedroom looking for something to do. You can—no. You did that yesterday. What is there? It seems what is harder than a hard life is an easy one.

We can quarantine people But We can't quarantine Love

So fight,” he growled, his eyes flaring. “Fight with the spirit of the warrior I know lives in you. Fight for the good days. Fight to be stronger than anything the world hurls at you, fight for what you want. Always, Tatum, always. Because no one but you can make your life what you want it to be.

the whole world rejects you, what’s the point in sticking around? Life is already too difficult and too painful to take on the added burden of being without a community, quarantined in solitary confinement psychologically, intuitively, and emotionally. Was there a place for me in this world?

Zakhar Georgiyevich Travkin could have stopped right there! But no! Continuing his attempt to expunge his part in this and to stand erect before his own conscience, he rose from behind his desk--he had never stood up in my presence in my former life--and reached across the quarantine line that separated us and gave me his hand, although he would never have reached out his hand to me had I remained a free man. And pressing my hand, while his whole suite stood there in mute horror, showing that warmth that may appear in an habitually severe face, he said fearlessly and precisely: 'I wish you happiness, Captain!

The AIDS pandemic forced humans to cover their genitals with condoms. The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing them to put on masks. It is as if many people weren’t already going through life putting on a million masks and changing them based on convenience and self-interest. It is as if countless humans on this planet weren’t already forced to keep their mouths shut and endure the misfortunes imposed on them by the ‘fortunate’ few. I wonder which body part we will be forced to cover next. I wonder if, in the first place, all of this is happening because our eyes were covered all along. Are we heading to a time when staying safe becomes akin to a death sentence with stay of execution?

I’d never realised that I was fated to be the king of toilet paper, but if that was my destiny in life then I’d happily sit up on my Charmin throne and lord it over everyone.

This lockdown has enough me time to help you to get your life together. Refuse to come out of this lockdown being the same.

Department stores have come out with a new size for their clothing line that fits me perfectly. The label reads, XXL-LOL!

No one gets fridge magnets for the travel this summer, because this season we have gone too far. And for all the trips you make inwards, there are no souvenirs and no postcards.

Hope shines through unsealed blinds Cobwebs cleared From overworked minds QUARANTINE+VE

We know there's social distancing. No need for the dramatic hand raise and exaggerated sidestep. That's just obnoxious.

Jesus Mom, put on some clothes. Things your child says when she walks into kitchen during the lockdown.

Been doing tons of crunches since the lockdown began. Crunchn' these chips, this popcorn, these cashews, this cookie...

I'm gaining weight in the role I was not even casted or stole! I put weight for the castaway I didn't even choose to play!

You couldn't do this and you couldn't do that, but life went on.

Spring-cleaned minds Stripped of the mesh Raring to venture out afresh QUARANTINE+VE

When you can't go outside, how about exploring the inner universe, it has far more potential than the external world can ever offer.

Thus, the ghettoization of the Palestinians in Gaza did not reap any dividends. The ghettoized community continued to express its will for life by firing primitive missiles into Israel. Ghettoizing or quarantining unwanted communities, even if they were regarded as dangerous, has never worked in history as a solution. The Jews know it best from their own history

We can't allow everyone to do what they want or as they please, because some of those people are not doing the right thing and others are not in the sane state of mind. Their actions are the consequences everyone is suffering today.

Mine was, probably, the easiest imaginable kind of arrest. It did not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin, nor wrench me from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea, where, depending on one's point of view, either we had surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us, and it deprived me only of my familiar artillery battery and the scenes of the last three months of war. The brigade commander called me to his headquarters and asked me for my pistol; I turned it over without suspecting any evil intent, when suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped forward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star on my cap, my shoulder boards, my officer's belt, my map case, and they shouted theatrically: "You are under arrest!" Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could explain was, "Me? What for?" Across the sheer gap separating me from those left behind, across that quarantine line not event a sound dared penetrate, came the unthinkable magic words of the brigade commander: "Sholzhenitsyn. Come back here." "You have ..." he asked weightily, "a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?" I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my correspondence with a school friend and understood what direction to expect danger.

Social psychologists have likened the effects of COVID-19 to that of the great World Wars for the characteristics are all there down to the sirens and curfews; it is after all a life-altering event that has blanketed the world with uncertainty and an unfathomable restriction on personal freedoms.

I hope everyone is laughing at this Corona Virus jokes and Memes, with their hands being sanitized or washed with soap. They have Isolated themselves from the crowd and they have been self quarantined or practicing social distance. If not then the joke is on them. Corona will have the last laugh on their lives

Live every day as if you might be struck blind--that was the rule I made for myself now. In those first few days after the quarantine was lifted, we went around marveling at the smallest things, as if the Spanish flu had rendered us all blind & we'd suddenly gained our sight again. Every detail seemed suddenly as sharp as if seen for the first time. Life returned to SF, and it had never been more precious.

It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God’s quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite—the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species—a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. The destruction or enslavement of other species in the universe, if such there are, is to these minds a welcome corollary.

His task was to survive and endure through the harsh winter months, winnowing his soul until it could cross to the spirit world. There, he would undertake the search for his guide, a god embodied in some kind of beast or bird, who would protect him throughout his life. His spirit guide would enlighten his mind and guide his steps in myriad ways, until the end of his life. In those cold woods, he would learn his destiny. He said that if the spirit guide came to him in the form of a snake, then he would gain his heart’s desire, and become pawaaw. “I thought of the quarantine of Jesus, a similar harsh and lonely trial of character and purpose. But that vigil passed in searing desert, not snowy wood. And when, at the end, the devil came with his visions of cities and offers of power, Jesus shunned him. Caleb desired to bid him welcome.

Government didn’t say you must stop worshiping God. You must stop praying or preaching the word of God. You must stop believing in God or exercising your faith. You must stop your religion, but what is asking for is everyone should stop human contact. and should social distance themselves, because the virus spread easily in a group of people. By limiting contact, it means not going to church, Easter, clubs, Tavern, events, malls, gym ,school, work. I need you to do your part in order for me to survive.

Refuse to come out of the lockdown being the same. Its either you will appreciate things, people, your job and life more. Its either you would have acquired new or more skills, knowledge ,information or you have improved in them. Its either you saw what you were doing wrong, what is important in life and what you should focus on. Its either your saw which people to be with or which ones to avoid. This lockdown has enough me time to help you to get your life together. Refuse to come out of it being the same.

I feel that quarantine has brought me closer to other people, to everyone. Like, we are all finally on the same page now. I have spent my life attending to, and cultivating, my inner world. Moving outwards from what is within my heart and within the deepest recesses of my mind. "From-in-to-out" has always been my mode of living. I have always looked at everyone else and thought that they fill their hearts and their minds with static noise, so much noise. They feel things, but then they can just go and drown all of that in work immersion; they have pressing issues on their minds, but they can just go and drown the sounds of their own thoughts in a one-night-stand; they have wounds on their spirits, but they can evade feeling those wounds and healing them, by blowing themselves into larger-than-life projections in the workplace, at school, on social media. So much noise, just so much noise. I feel as though, all my life, I have been screaming at the world, begging people to go inward, to face their angels and their demons, to know themselves. Now in quarantine, I think everyone is forced to do exactly that. The world is forced into a quietness that should of happened long ago, every day, all the time. A quietness of retreating into the knowledge of, and the acquaintance with, the mind, the heart. I feel that now, at long last, everybody else is on the same page as myself. Being alone in quarantine is not mentally or emotionally or spiritually difficult for me. This is because I know the person I am with, I know me. And I like her.

If I've learned one thing in my years of studying the social impacts of disease, it's that we live in a world where we're connected, for better or worse, to the people in our human community by the microbes that we share between us. And in times of contagious disease crisis, if we fail to recognize our shared connection, we are most certainly doomed, because our fates hang together, yoked by tiny particles that threaten us all. Scores of historical figures-both famous and infamous-have taught me as much. By learning the stories of those who lived before us, by educating ourselves about the worlds they inhabited and the viruses and bacteria that lived in, with, and through them, we can learn how to emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic stronger than ever before and well prepared for the next new disease we will inevitably face. If we don't learn from their examples, however, I foresee a world adrift, damned by alienation from its own history, a victim of self-annihilation cued, rather than caused, by the novel coronavirus.

When society felt adrift in the wake of its loss of religious belief, people turned to science as the anchor that could stabilize them. Again, this is not an argument about the importance or lack thereof of religion. It's rather a statement that humans seek frameworks by which to guide their understanding of the world, and whether they turn to religion or science or something in between, they'll find something to grasp hold of and use to make sense of an often senseless and chaotic world. In my view. we've done that with science over the last 150 years, resulting in many problematic outcomes.

I know that gen Z has it tough—they’re losing their proms and graduations to the quarantine, they’re on deck to bear the full brunt of climate catastrophe, and they’re inheriting a carcass of a society that’s been fattened up and picked clean by the billionaire class, leaving them with virtually no shot at a life without crushing financial and existential anxiety, let alone any fantasy of retiring from their thankless toil or leaving anything of value to their own children. That’s bad. BUT, counterpoint! Millennials have to deal with a bunch of that same stuff, kind of, PLUS we had to be teenagers when American Pie came out!... American Pie absolutely captivated a generation because my generation is tacky as hell. “I have a hot girlfriend but she doesn’t want to have sex” was an entire genre of movies in the ’90s. In the ’90s, people loved it when things were “raunchy” (ew!). Every guy at my high school wanted to be Stifler! Can you imagine what that kind of an environment does to a person? To be of the demographic that has a Ron Burgundy quote for every occasion, without the understanding that Ron Burgundy is a satire? This is why we have Jenny McCarthy, I’m pretty sure, and, by extension, the great whooping cough revival of 2014. Thanks a lot, jocks!

He liked how brave she was—that dauntless courage she’d had when she faced off against Gargoyle at the trials. The lack of hesitation to chase after Hawthorn or take out the Detonator. The bravery that veered just a bit toward recklessness. Sometimes he wished he could be more like her, always so confident in her own motivations that she didn’t mind bending the rules from time to time. That’s how Adrian felt when he was the Sentinel. His conviction that he knew what was right gave him the courage to act, even when he would have hesitated as Adrian or Sketch. But Nova never hesitated. Her compass never seemed to falter. He liked that she defied the rules of their society—refusing to bend for the Council, when so many others would have been falling over themselves to impress them. Refusing to apologize for their decision to go after the Librarian, despite the protocols, because she believed wholeheartedly that they made the right choice with the options they’d been given. He liked that she’d destroyed him at every one of those carnival games. He liked that she hadn’t flinched when he brought a dinosaur to life in the palm of her hand. He liked that she’d raced into the quarantine to help Max, despite having no clue what she was going to do when she got there, only that she had to do something. He liked that she showed compassion for Max, sometimes even indignation for the way his ability was being used—but never pity. He even liked the way she feigned enthusiasm for things like the Sidekick Olympics, when it was clear she would have rather been doing just about anything else. But no matter how long the growing list of things that attracted him to Nova McLain had become, he still found her feelings toward him to be a mystery, with an annoying shortage of evidence to support the theory that maybe, just maybe, she sort of liked him too. A smile here. A blush there. It was an infuriatingly short list. He was probably reading into things. It didn’t matter, he told himself again and again. He couldn’t risk getting too close to anyone right now.

Separated from everyone, in the fifteenth dungeon, was a small man with fiery brown eyes and wet towels wrapped around his head. For several days his legs had been black, and his gums were bleeding. Fifty-nine years old and exhausted beyond measure, he paced silently up and down, always the same five steps, back and forth. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . an interminable shuffle between the wall and door of his cell. He had no work, no books, nothing to write on. And so he walked. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . His dungeon was next door to La Fortaleza, the governor’s mansion in Old San Juan, less than two hundred feet away. The governor had been his friend and had even voted for him for the Puerto Rican legislature in 1932. This didn’t help much now. The governor had ordered his arrest. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Life had turned him into a pendulum; it had all been mathematically worked out. This shuttle back and forth in his cell comprised his entire universe. He had no other choice. His transformation into a living corpse suited his captors perfectly. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Fourteen hours of walking: to master this art of endless movement, he’d learned to keep his head down, hands behind his back, stepping neither too fast nor too slow, every stride the same length. He’d also learned to chew tobacco and smear the nicotined saliva on his face and neck to keep the mosquitoes away. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The heat was so stifling, he needed to take off his clothes, but he couldn’t. He wrapped even more towels around his head and looked up as the guard’s shadow hit the wall. He felt like an animal in a pit, watched by the hunter who had just ensnared him. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . Far away, he could hear the ocean breaking on the rocks of San Juan’s harbor and the screams of demented inmates as they cried and howled in the quarantine gallery. A tropical rain splashed the iron roof nearly every day. The dungeons dripped with a stifling humidity that saturated everything, and mosquitoes invaded during every rainfall. Green mold crept along the cracks of his cell, and scarab beetles marched single file, along the mold lines, and into his bathroom bucket. The murderer started screaming. The lunatic in dungeon seven had flung his own feces over the ceiling rail. It landed in dungeon five and frightened the Puerto Rico Upland gecko. The murderer, of course, was threatening to kill the lunatic. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . The man started walking again. It was his only world. The grass had grown thick over the grave of his youth. He was no longer a human being, no longer a man. Prison had entered him, and he had become the prison. He fought this feeling every day. One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He was a lawyer, journalist, chemical engineer, and president of the Nationalist Party. He was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and spoke six languages. He had served as a first lieutenant in World War I and led a company of two hundred men. He had served as president of the Cosmopolitan Club at Harvard and helped Éamon de Valera draft the constitution of the Free State of Ireland.5 One, two, three, four, five, and turn . . . He would spend twenty-five years in prison—many of them in this dungeon, in the belly of La Princesa. He walked back and forth for decades, with wet towels wrapped around his head. The guards all laughed, declared him insane, and called him El Rey de las Toallas. The King of the Towels. His name was Pedro Albizu Campos.

It kept people apart. . . . It took away all your community life, you had no community life, you had no school life, you had no church life, you had nothing. . . . It completely destroyed all family and community life. People were afraid to kiss one another, people were afraid to eat with one another, they were afraid to have anything that made contact because that’s how you got the flu. . . . It destroyed those contacts and destroyed the intimacy that existed amongst people. . . . You were constantly afraid, you were afraid because you saw so much death around you, you were surrounded by death. . . . When each day dawned you didn’t know whether you would be there when the sun set that day. It wiped out entire families from the time that the day began in the morning to bedtime at night—entire families were gone completely, there wasn’t any single soul left, and that didn’t happen just intermittently, it happened all the way across the neighborhoods, it was a terrifying experience. It justifiably should be called a plague because that’s what it was. . . . You were quarantined, is what you were, from fear, it was so quick, so sudden. . . . There was an aura of a constant fear that you lived through from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night.

Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion. A June 24, 2021 BMJ study22 showed that US life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during the quarantine. Since COVID mortalities were mainly among the elderly, and the average age of death from COVID in the UK was 82.4, which was above the average lifespan,23 the virus could not by itself cause the astonishing decline. As we shall see, Hispanic and Black Americans often shoulder the heaviest burden of Dr. Fauci’s public health adventures. In this respect, his COVID-19 countermeasures proved no exception. Between 2018 and 2020, the average Hispanic American lost around 3.9 years in longevity, while the average lifespan of a Black American dropped by 3.25 years.24 This dramatic culling was unique to America. Between 2018 and 2020, the 1.9 year decrease in average life expectancy at birth in the US was roughly 8.5 times the average decrease in 16 comparable countries, all of which were measured in months, not years.25

The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness. And if physical science, whatever it may have to say about the origin of life, leaves us necessarily in the dark about consciousness, that shows that it cannot provide the basic form of intelligibility for this world. There must be a very different way in which t hings as they are make sense, and that includes the physical world, since the problem cannot be quarantined in the mind.

He wasn’t sure how a teenager recently freed from a decade’s imprisonment in an inferno under a quarantined city had a more active social life than he did, though considering his own circle, he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised.

However, there have been close calls where we were extremely lucky that there was a human in the loop. On October 27, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, eleven U.S. Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph had cornered the Soviet submarine B-59 near Cuba, in international waters outside the U.S. “quarantine” area. What they didn’t know was that the temperature onboard had risen past 45°C (113°F) because the submarine’s batteries were running out and the air-conditioning had stopped. On the verge of carbon dioxide poisoning, many crew members had fainted. The crew had had no contact with Moscow for days and didn’t know whether World War III had already begun. Then the Americans started dropping small depth charges, which they had, unbeknownst to the crew, told Moscow were merely meant to force the sub to surface and leave. “We thought—that’s it—the end,” crew member V. P. Orlov recalled. “It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer.” What the Americans also didn’t know was that the B-59 crew had a nuclear torpedo that they were authorized to launch without clearing it with Moscow. Indeed, Captain Savitski decided to launch the nuclear torpedo. Valentin Grigorievich, the torpedo officer, exclaimed: “We will die, but we will sink them all—we will not disgrace our navy!” Fortunately, the decision to launch had to be authorized by three officers on board, and one of them, Vasili Arkhipov, said no. It’s sobering that very few have heard of Arkhipov, although his decision may have averted World War III and been the single most valuable contribution to humanity in modern history.38 It’s also sobering to contemplate what might have happened had B-59 been an autonomous AI-controlled submarine with no humans in the loop.

The truth can haunt you and follow you for the rest of your life if you don’t try and face it. The truth can be hurtful, frightening, unforgiving… But it’s a necessary step,

The day before we headed out was an unusually warm day. Shasta had a hard time of it. Bindi wrapped her in wet towels to help her cool off. Every few minutes she would raise her head and bark a bit. The last couple of years, Shasta’s back had been out so bad that I would wheelbarrow her around. She always liked sleeping in the car. I think it made her excited to be going on a trip. That night she seemed so restless that I put her in the car and kissed her good night. I knew she’d be happiest there. In the morning, we were off to our first official day of filming the movie. Steve put the last few things together in the zoo. I went out to get Shasta organized for staying with a friend. She was still asleep. “Good morning, lazybones,” I said. I bent down to give her a kiss on the forehead. Then I realized she wasn’t there. Sometime during the night, Shasta had died. She was seventeen and a half years old, the only dog I ever had. She went through nine months of quarantine to join me in Australia. She had been a loyal friend and an excellent guard dog. Bindi and I said good-bye to Shasta together. We discussed the circle of life and collected a few of Shasta’s favorite things. She would be buried with her favorite blanket. I knew I’d never have another dog. Now Sui was the only dog in the family.

Completely naïve about Australia’s importation and quarantine regulations, I nevertheless thought that surely there might be some opportunities down under for people doing educational work with wildlife, who might be able to take a cougar. Visiting Australia again, I thought, might not be a bad idea. How could I have known then that my decision would result, only a short time later, in a chance meeting with the man who would change my life?

The tower held its own secret, a suite held in reserve for dark days. This was the quarantine suite, a valued space in these years before antibiotics, with bedrooms and its own kitchen, a refuge in case of a pandemic.

If a man continues to call a good thing bad, he will inevitably lose his sense of moral distinctions. Is this always the result? Is it not possible to quarantine a certain kind of deception so that it will not affect the rest of one’s life? May not the underprivileged do with deception as it relates to his soul what the human body does with tubercle bacilli? The body seems unable to destroy the bacilli, so nature builds a prison for them, walls them in with a tick fibrosis so that their toxin cannot escape from the lungs into the blood stream. As long as the victims exercises care in the matter of the rest, work, and diet, normal activities may be pursued without harm. Is deception a comparable technique of survival, the fibrosis that protects the life from poison in its total outlook or in its other relations? Or, to change the figure, may not deception be regarded under some circumstances as a kind of blind spot that functional in a limited area of experience? No! Such questions are merely attempts to rationalize ones way out of a critical difficulty. The penalty of deception is to become a deception, with all sense of moral discrimination vitiated. A man who lies habitually becomes a lie, and it is increasingly impossible for him to know when he is lying and when he is not.

I sipped freshly squeezed orange juice as I sat on the veranda of the most beautiful resort I’d ever visited in my life, reading a reverse harem book on my Kindle.

The virus. For the past couple of months ‘the virus’ had been like a pissy next door neighbour in our lives who let his dog shit on our lawn and peeped over our fence any time we got too comfortable in our own space. It was an ever-present, lonely pervert of a neighbour who needed to get a life. I knew Dad

Want to know the trick to getting over the love of your life? Watch her fuck your brother’s brains out, and it will kill all feelings inside you resembling love. My insides were so numb that there were no feelings left at all. Love was a feeling, so I guess problem solved.

I couldn’t live life denying what we meant to one another. She’d always be my best friend and my other half. I couldn’t change that. Our codependency on each other was unconventional, but it was also the only thing that made me complete. So, I negotiated with myself. I’d allow myself small glimpses of her, and it’d be enough to make me feel but not enough to destroy me.

Fight with the spirit of the warrior I know lives in you. Fight for the good days. Fight to be stronger than anything the world hurls at you, fight for what you want. Always, Tatum, always. Because no one but you can make your life what you want it to be.

There was no me without Tatum anymore. Shit, I didn’t think any of us wanted to consider an existence without her in it. So it hadn't been hard to realise that I'd rather eat a bullet than linger on in this life without her.

Liam had sighed like that disappointed him but mostly it just made me feel sad for my uncle. He deserved more than that from life. He deserved better than to live each day just waiting to die. But I wasn’t capable of changing his fate. I just hoped one day he met someone who was.

For so long I thought the only real meaning my life held was in seeking revenge for what Troy Memphis did to my family,” I said to her in a low voice, not even certain she could hear me over the roar of the helicopter. “But I was so fucking wrong. So, so wrong, Tatum. Because fearing for your life almost destroyed me. It made me realise that I have so much more to live for than some vendetta. I love you. I love you with everything I am and everything I’ll ever be

My whole life I've fought with all I have to maintain control in everything," I said to her as she looked down at me, her hands resting on my shoulders, wet hair sticking to her skin. "And then you came along and brought more chaos to my life than I ever would have believed I could handle. I tried to break you. But you were the one who broke me. You forced me out of my comfort zone again and again until I no longer knew what comfortable felt like. You make my skin itch with a need for more. And you are that more. I hope you realise I'm never going to let you go now.

Anyone deserves the West who arrives with fresh energy to break up the deadly, antiseptic boredom of its civilization, prepared to undergo the quarantine that we prescribe for immigrants. We do not realize that our whole life has become a quarantine, and that all our countries have become barracks and concentration camps, admittedly with all the modern conveniences.

acid broke down the compound, making their waste devastating. They said that once it was absorbed, it ruined the cellular walls of plant cells, causing them to be weak, to die. I don’t know the science behind it, but it spread like a plague through plant life. All across the Midwest, crops withered, trees rotted, and forests turned brown. They said that the soil was completely useless due to highly acidic toxins which destroyed all the minerals and nutrients plants needed to thrive. Everything started dying. We watched on television as the Amazon and lush forests in India began to wither and blacken. The governments took action, quickly quarantining any infected areas, halting foot traffic, and trying their hardest to stop the spread. To be honest, it could have worked had we realized sooner. Everything along the Missouri, the Platte, the Canadian, the Pecos, Red, and Mississippi rivers all began to die. The runoff and seepage killed everything, turning the heart of America into a

I came to see if we had any chance of starting over.” I flinched and caught my breath, his audacity slapping me with the force of an open hand. “Start over?” I felt Mama’s face fit over mine like a mask. That haughty look she reserved for those who addressed her in a manner less than respectful. “A fiancée ends things quite thoroughly.” And yet my heart lurched at the thought that he wanted me again. He leaned back in his chair, a tad more confident, it seemed. More like the Arthur I’d fallen in love with. “She and I were thrown together during the quarantine. It wasn’t like I went looking for another woman.” He shrugged. “Besides, with the war over, I’ll be discharged. We can be together much sooner than we thought possible.” “Be together? As in, get married?” Something in his manner alarmed me. I wasn’t sure what. The return of his arrogance, perhaps? Again his gaze skittered away. “Eventually.” The word barbed at my heart. “But you were going to marry her right away, weren’t you? You told me you were engaged.” He stared at the door that led outside. “She didn’t have any reason to wait. You have—” He swatted his hand toward the front of the house, where the children remained quiet. I stiffened. “I have responsibilities at the moment, yes.” “We’d have to wait, then. Until you get rid of them.” My eyebrows lifted. “Get rid of them? What do you mean? Are you saying you don’t want children? Or that you don’t want these children?” “We have our own life to lead, Rebekah. Children would . . . complicate things. Their daddy will be home soon, right? And then you’ll be free. Besides, I don’t remember you being eager for babies before.” I chewed the edge of my fingernail as I considered how to reply. “You’re right. I wasn’t. But things have changed. My mother has been ill. My brother is dying. I haven’t heard back from Fra—the children’s father. But it’s more than that.” My mouth proclaimed words I hadn’t even thought through completely, words that popped from the soil of my heart like green beans on a hot summer day. His mouth opened and shut, smooth words slithering from his grasp. That handsome face. Those deep blue eyes. They’d roped me in like a naïve calf. But I wasn’t as childlike as I’d once been.

Borromeo also organized partial quarantines, especially for women, whom he regarded not only as more likely to occasion sin but as the primary carriers of plague (because, he said, they talked so much and constantly visited each other’s houses).

Anthony Fauci seems to have not considered that his unprecedented quarantine of the healthy would kill far more people than COVID, obliterate the global economy, plunge millions into poverty and bankruptcy, and grievously wound constitutional democracy globally. We have no way of knowing how many people died from isolation, unemployment, deferred medical care, depression, mental illness, obesity, stress, overdoses, suicide, addiction, alcoholism, and the accidents that so often accompany despair. We cannot dismiss the accusations that his lockdowns proved more deadly than the contagion. A June 24, 2021 BMJ study22 showed that US life expectancy decreased by 1.9 years during the quarantine.

In May 1896, the thoughtful justices of the high court, men who help to clarify national standards for everyone, determine that "repellent intimacy" is a persuasive argument. The law of quarantine is affirmed. "We think the enforced separation of the races. . .neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws," writes associate justice Henry B. Brown in a 7-1 ruling. The main point, says Justice Brown, is that "legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts." The encirclement is complete. Race quarantine becomes the custom in all the land. White supremacy is acclaimed in habit, in thought and in law.

I'm not making any claims here about whether secularization was good or bad-I'm simply saying that in my experience studying cultural history, people never simply let go of religion, they rather find new things to guide their behaviors and actions: essentially, they create new religions our of secular things. In the late 1800's, this new guiding force was science, and faith in science as a means of solving all the world's most complex problems (even today we call the study of government political science, so you can see that this mindset still pervades our society) allowed people to indulge in the fantasy of germ whack-a-mole. And, of course, handwashing and antiseptic techniques do reduce contagious disease transmission, so fortunately and unfortunately (yes, I mean both at once), the fallacy of playing whack-a-mole with germs reaped positive rewards to some extent, but also allowed society to take the delusion of a germ-free life too far. This sort of thinking is a logical fallacy called an 'appeal to ignorance.' An appeal to ignorance occurs when we have been doing something to ward off a negative effect, and when said negative events never happens, we are all too easily able to assume (possibly incorrectly) that our actions prevented the negative event from occurring.

Perhaps it does come back to valuing community, after all. Recent studies in science communication have suggested what I've sketched out in this chapter: that scientific literacy is not the variable that determines whether or not a group will accept the reality of a public health issue like vaccination or global warning: social groups are. While those individuals tested demonstrated a surprising ability to factually interpret scientific findings, they tended to eventually revert to in-group thinking about the issue, siding with whatever their main social group already believed. We humans are social, after all. Our social nature is why solitary confinement is potentially a human rights violation, why just about all of us wish we weren't having to stay home during the COVID crisis, why we all cling to Zoom meetings-why children yell at one another across balconies, starved for the sound of another child's voice. We all do the same dance of retreating to our social safety spaces. And if our 'safe' social group told us that our experience during the pandemic was a lie? Well, it seems we'd be more likely to believe our friends than science, because, as I've argued elsewhere...in times of desperate calamity, all we humans really have is one another. I have no answer to this twisted dilemma that the healthy carrier narrative, via the vehicle of COVID-19, has presented to us in the United States, but understanding the dilemma rightly is surely important.

America is the land of boot-strapping individualism, and that mindset has extended to expectations that good American citizens look out for their own health (think about the media campaigns you see to go get mammograms or to know the signs of a stroke). Ironically, this grassroots method of trying to keep a large population healthy through self-management and self-monitoring leads to a predicament in which we suddenly need everyone to do the same thing for public health reasons. First, we're asking a population steeped in individualistic culture to concern itself with the public good-for public rights to supersede individual rights, that is. But second and just as important, we're asking individuals to believe in a publicly defined reality and not in a personally informed one. In short, we're asking Americans to suddenly stop doing everything that we generally ask them to do in regard to public health (look after your own body, monitor your own symptoms) and instead urging an about-face (do things to protect other people's bodies, and stop assuming you know what your own body is 'telling you.) That's a tall order, to say the least.

Mary Mallon was born in 1869 in Cookstown, County Tyrone, then part of British-ruled Ireland. Like many of her countrymen, she immigrated to the United States at a young age, where she eventually found employment as a cook. During her lifetime, it was suspected that she has unintentionally (albeit perhaps negligently) infected over fifty people with typhoid. Typhoid fever is a bacterial disease caused by gastrointestinal infection by Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi. In most patients, it causes an unpleasant but manageable disease that resolves fully. However, as many as one in twenty patients become chronic carriers, who continue to be infectious for their lifetimes. Mary Mallon was one of the unfortunate few who fell into that category. It is hypothesised today that she contracted typhoid at birth. Her case, which involved prolonged quarantine on North Brother Island for almost half her life, raises complex moral and ethical questions about reconciling the interests of public health with the moral imperative to respect individual liberties and treat the sick (even if asymptomatic) with compassion.

XL-Ant Life is meant to inspire happiness and positivity through playfulness and light-hearted humor. Based off the play on words of "Excellent Life," XL-Ant Life was created in the Spring of 2020 during quarantine, we wanted to create a brand that helps people think about the good, have fun, and appreciate the little moments in life in a world where it's easy to think about the bad and be negative.

I eyed him suspiciously. “But what if I do that and life is bad? Like falling out of a tree bad.” “Then you’ve gotta fight, kiddo,” he said fiercely. “Because life will be bad sometimes. It’ll test you and push you and you’ll want to give up, but if you do it’ll suck every drop of happiness out of you until there’s nothing left.” “I don’t want that,” I murmured. “So fight,” he growled, his eyes flaring. “Fight with the spirit of the warrior I know lives in you. Fight for the good days. Fight to be stronger than anything the world hurls at you, fight for what you want. Always, Tatum, always. Because no one but you can make your life what you want it to be.

It is simply hard to break free from our belief in the experiences of our own bodies, but this is an even greater difficulty to overcome when we're talking about changing our shared cultural attitudes (like the American belief in bootstrapping individualism, for instance). A shared cultural belief is like being trapped in an invisible box. It's hard to break free, of course, but first you have to realize that you're trapped, and this is even harder because you can't see the box to begin with.

It occurred to me that Harry Potter had had it easy in comparison to the Lord Coldemort who was currently making my life a misery. At least Harry had had friends. And Dumbledore. Man, I wish I had a Dumbledore. I supposed Monroe kinda counted. He was like a hot Dumbledore you wanted to Slytherin to bed with and suck his Elder wand.

But I guessed that was life. One moment you’re skipping along thinking everything’s just great, and the next thing you know you get sucker punched out of nowhere and everything you thought you could rely on is just gone. And what do you have left? Rage and outrage. Injustice and hopelessness. Nothing and everything. It’s all gone but there’s still so much here too. It’s just that none of it looks the same anymore.

So fight,” he growled, his eyes flaring. “Fight with the spirit of the warrior I know lives in you. Fight for the good days. Fight to be stronger than anything the world hurls at you, fight for what you want. Always, Tatum, always. Because no one but you can make your life what you want it to be.” “But how do I know what I want?

In my discipline, we affectionately refer to this sort of box (culture) as a zeitgeist, which literally translates to 'time ghost.' Unfortunately for any of you expecting spooky surprises, a zeitgeist doesn't refer to a literal ghost but is better understood as the 'spirit of the age,' although even this doesn't quite pin down its meaning. Think of any stereotype of any decade in the last century-from the Roaring Twenties, Flower Power of the sixties-any of these could certainly be said to illustrate the zeitgeist of that era. But zeitgeists can also be more specific than this, and its the SSDC that ends up developing a decent portion our zeitgeists, the sorts of zeitgeists that can be doubly hard to see outside of because they define more than just lifestyle practices. They define everything we think we know about our collective identities and our collective realities. Of relevance here is the zeitgeist of 'I know best about my body.' It's a lesson we teach people from almost before they can talk: 'You know your body,' 'Listen to your body,' and so forth. And while these are great truisms to teach our children about consent and empowerment as they grow older, they do come with blinders as they become our culture's zeitgeist. How can we really expect people to do a 180 on this logic all of a sudden in 2021?...It would be more productive of us to ask the broad cultural reasons that people resist such mandates, rather than scolding individuals for not conforming. Only then, I think, can we slowly begin to change our collective zeitgeists to those that encourage ownership and empowerment of our own bodies and also add in a healthy dose of 'Sometimes the body is silent' or 'Trust one's own body in collaboration with trusted experts' or something of the like. Ironically enough, the very denial of any shared realities that I mentioned in Lesson 20 is its own zeitgeist that has been gaining momentum for the last five years or so. I worry that this only allows the virus-or any other pathogen in our future-a foothold. Our divisions are their smorgasbord. How can we plan and strategize if we can't agree that we need to plan or strategize to begin with? This is one of the biggest hurdles we'll need to overcome to ensure humanity's long-term survival. It's possibly one of the most terrifying threats to humanity that I've seen in my lifetime-for if our only shared belief is that there is not shared beliefs, where do we go from there?

My car is already packed with clothes and supplies for all of us," Saint snapped like that was obvious just as I made it back to him. "I also took the liberty of securing Tatum's father's ashes and the letters from her sister down in the crypt." "What about the necklace she asked me to look after?" Monroe asked, taking a step back, like he was willing to go hunting for it even as we heard a knock at the front door. Saint pressed a finger to his lips before opening a pocket on the side of the bag of cash he held, revealing the necklace alongside the plaque my mom had given me, Nash's little collection of mementos from his previous life and Kyan's sketchbook. Monroe gaped at him in clear confusion as to how Saint had managed to steal his most prized possessions, but considering our situation he couldn’t really fault his methods. I caught a glimpse of the pen and lighter Saint had stolen from me and Kyan oh so long ago too before he zipped the pocket shut again and threw the bag over his shoulder. My heart surged with love for my brother as we hounded him towards the crypt on silent feet. For someone who claimed not to understand love or sentiments, he'd instantly figured out the few things that meant the most to the people he cared about and had secured them in preparation of this happening. Deep down, Saint Memphis was as soft as butter and he was starting to let it show.

We emphasize and cannot emphasize enough one point about this very, very prominent theme in Mark. His story of failed discipleship is his warning gift to all who ever hear or read his narrative. We must think of Lent today as a penitential season because we know that, like those first disciples, we would like to avoid the implications of this journey with Jesus. We would like its Holy Week conclusion to be about the interior rather than the exterior life, about heaven rather than earth, about the future rather than the present, and, above all else, about religion safely and securely quarantined from politics. Confronting violent political power and unjust religious collaboration is dangerous in most times and most places, first century and twenty-first century alike.

There is an old piece of wisdom in biohazard work that goes like this: you can never know when life is exterminated. Life will survive almost any blitz. Total, unequivocal sterilization is extremely difficult to achieve in practice and is almost impossible to verify afterward. However, a Sunbeam cookout that lasts for three days and exterminates all samples of niger implies success. The monkey house had been sterilized. Ebola had met opposition. For a short while, until life could re-establish itself there, the Reston Primate Quarantine Unit was the only building in the world where nothing lived, nothing at all.

The sane, Mr. Meagles intimates, are people plagued by suspicions of their own madness. Such life as they have is lived in quarantine. But people are always persecuted by what they protect themselves from. Just as the overprotected child assumes there must be terrifying things out there if he needs so much protection, and can’t stop thinking about them, and lives in fear; by the same token, the sane are those obsessed by their own madness.

Recently, I was watching a webinar from a child psychologist. The topic was something like “a parent’s guide to surviving quarantine,” and I figured I could use all the help I could get. During the webinar, the psychologist gave the following advice: “Don’t get furious. Get curious.

I mean everything is always changing, you’ll always be moving forward, time will keep passing, stuff will forever happen to you. So you have to go out there and experience the world and make the most of it, because if you don’t, life will one day come knocking on your door and you won’t like what it has to say.

You’ll know it when you find it.” “But what if I don’t know it?” I asked sheepishly. His smile dropped away. “Then you’ll know it when you lose it.” “Oh,” I breathed. “But the world is full of second chances, kiddo,” he promised. “You can make things good. Any situation. No matter how bad. It can be good again. I swear it. You’ve just gotta be brave enough to give life hell. Don’t settle for less. You’re not here to bow to the world, beautiful girl, you’re here to make the world bow to you.

Not really," I replied. "You only have to take one look at the girl - a real look, beyond the fucking stunning exterior to the richness of her soul beneath it and the power she commands without even trying. Once you see that, I don't think anyone would be surprised that she caught the four of us under her spell. I mean, shit, that girl deserves a whole hell of a lot from this life and if we can even begin to give it to her then I'm all in.

The whole business was so completely unthinkable that my mind, like almost all the other minds that were in the same situation, simply stopped trying to cope with it, and refixed its focus on the ordinary routine of life.

Hey! How are you holding up? It's good and all to practice extra care for our health in the kind of situation we are in. However, may we also not disregard our psychological well-being. How's your mind? How do you stay sane while in quarantined in your homes? If you're running out of things to do, how about try checking out my book, "One Life: An Afghan Remembers"? It's available in Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, Authors Press, and other booksellers.

Quando se sente de mais, o Tejo é Atlântico sem número, e Cacilhas outro continente, ou até outro universo.

I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.

Learning new minimalistic ways of being Not merely looking But really seeing QUARANTINE+VE

Stars sparkle With unknown sheen Clouds milkier than ever been So much going right for mother nature Reinstated partly To original stature QUARANTINE+VE

Disparage not the modest word I tell all Ye guys, behold Because Words can bloodlessly move Mountains, I’m told

It took away all your community life, you had no community life, you had no school life, you had no church life, you had nothing. . . . It completely destroyed all family and community life. People were afraid to kiss one another, people were afraid to eat with one another, they were afraid to have anything that made contact because that’s how you got the flu. . . . It destroyed those contacts and destroyed the intimacy that existed amongst people. . . . You were constantly afraid, you were afraid because you saw so much death around you, you were surrounded by death. . . . When each day dawned you didn’t know whether you would be there when the sun set that day. It wiped out entire families from the time that the day began in the morning to bedtime at night—entire families were gone completely, there wasn’t any single soul left, and that didn’t happen just intermittently, it happened all the way across the neighborhoods, it was a terrifying experience. It justifiably should be called a plague because that’s what it was. . . . You were quarantined, is what you were, from fear, it was so quick, so sudden. . . . There was an aura of a constant fear that you lived through from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night.

Until everyone understand that putting on mask, washing hands, doing social distancing, being on lockdown. You are not doing it for government , but rather you doing for yourself. If you cheat, then you cheat your own life. Then we are not ready for the lockdown to be lifted.

Buy the toilet paper; Bye to the life you knew before; By tomorrow, The storefronts will be closed down.

The victims, of course, feel differently. But the greatest number of them—the hourly workers and unemployed, the people dragging low credit scores through life—are poor. Prisoners are powerless. And in our society, where money buys influence, these WMD victims are nearly voiceless. Most are disenfranchised politically. Indeed, all too often the poor are blamed for their poverty, their bad schools, and the crime that afflicts their neighborhoods. That’s why few politicians even bother with antipoverty strategies. In the common view, the ills of poverty are more like a disease, and the effort—or at least the rhetoric—is to quarantine it and keep it from spreading to the middle class. We need to think about how we assign blame in modern life and how models exacerbate this cycle. But the poor are hardly the only victims of WMDs. Far from it. We’ve already seen how malevolent models can blacklist qualified job applicants and dock the pay of workers who don’t fit a corporation’s picture of ideal health. These WMDs hit the middle class as hard as anyone. Even the rich find themselves microtargeted by political models. And they scurry about as frantically as the rest of us to satisfy the remorseless WMD that rules college admissions and pollutes

I know nothing of dissent, because I do not make rules. Eating cake at 5am is not a crime when there are no laws in place. Sweet is the sleep of the lawless and cake-quenched.

But the world is full of second chances, kiddo,” he promised. “You can make things good. Any situation. No matter how bad. It can be good again. I swear it. You’ve just gotta be brave enough to give life hell. Don’t settle for less. You’re not here to bow to the world, beautiful girl, you’re here to make the world bow to you.

In this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, be peaceful knowing that: • Being quarantined does not necessarily mean you are COVID-19 +ve • Being COVID-19 +ve does not necessarily mean you will immediately die • And clearly, in the overall process of Life, death is unavoidable So, relax, don't panic, be responsible! Stay safe, stay at home, just be!!

Recalibrated life Recalibrated time Emeralds dusted Of emotional grime QUARANTINE+VE

Shunning all crutches of modern din Finding a stronger self within QUARANTINE+VE