Eula Biss

“In the story of Thetis and Achilles, it's clear this isn't really a safe environment. She's gone down to the River Styx - the dead are being ferried across in the background. There's something in this mythology that says that if you want invulnerability, if you want immortality, you pay a price.”

“If your child's going to ride in a car or go swimming or play soccer, all of those things involve risk. And if your child doesn't do any of those things, then they're probably sitting too much, and that involves risk, too.”

“There's a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they're indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity.”

“My own thinking is often clarified and extended by talking with students.”

“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.”

“In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot.”

“I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.”

“I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.”

“What I saw when I was doing research is that in pursuit of a middle ground, people will kind of split the difference between the two extremes that they're hearing. And I think what's problematic is that people are seeing vaccinating on schedule, on time, as an extreme position.”

“Yes, there's a higher rate of people living below the poverty line who aren't vaccinated. But it's much rarer for that to be a product of choice than a product of circumstance.”

“Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do.”

“We've been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we've been using that long, and it's been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we're using now.”

“My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories.”

“Our community of contagion really is a world community.”

“I think that people's resistance to vaccination isn't going to disappear until we address some of the nonmedical reasons for that resistance and people's discomfort and distrust of the government. That's bigger than what most medical professionals can handle.”

“I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.”

“If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent.”

“When I stepped onto the bridge over the Iowa River and stood looking out across the water, I knew I was home. I was wrong about that, as it turns out. And I know now that my certainty was based on a series of troubling misconceptions, but it would be years before I would lose the comfort that certainty gave me.”

“My son is fully vaccinated, but there is one immunization on the standard schedule that he did not receive on time. This was meant to be his very first shot, the hep B administered to most babies immediately after birth.”

“Art-making was part of my daily life from a very young age, and I still love that kind of everyday art-making.”