But was Anna nearer to starved or nearer to well? How to quantify the quality of being alive?
If I ever got around to loving anyone else, I thought suddenly, it would have to be someone who would neither muffle my thunder nor steal it.
At any rate, let’s not waste time on ruminations and regrets in the middle of a pandemic.
The line I found most laughable was the one about lying down for a fortnight; who could afford or manage that without a houseful of servants?
I will not feed my soul with sorrow.
I’m beginning to know enough to know that I know nothing.
I’d never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.
One couldn’t pick whom to love, thought Anne, The woman beside her was friend and sister and lover and many things besides. One could only hope to recognise love where it grew, and get a grip on it and hold on.
My job wasn’t to cure all Ita Noonan’s ills but to bring her safe through this particular calamity, I reminded myself, to push her little boat back into the current of what I imagined to be her barely bearable life.
It was only a path through the woods, I told myself. Tangled and faint and looping but a path just the same, and didn’t every path have an end?
The influenza pandemic of 1918 killed more people than the First World War – an estimated 3 to 6 per cent of the human race.
How to explain hypertension to a woman with no more than a ladylike education?
I told her, In Italy, they used to blame the influence of the constellations for making them sick – that’s where influenza comes from.
That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle – the influence of the stars.
And one of these days, even this flu will have run its course. Really? Mary O’Rahilly asked. How can you be sure? The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.
I tried to remember what it was the old ones used to sprinkle on us children at Halloween in the part of the country where Tim and I had grown up.
Thinking that maybe we were indeed the sport of the stars. With their invisible silks, they tugged us this way and that.
Increase in Reports of Influenza. A masterpiece of understatement, as if it were only the reporting that had increased, or perhaps the pandemic was a figment of the collective imagination. I wondered whether it was the newspaper publisher’s decision to play down the danger or if he’d received orders from above.
Learn even from enemies.
These inexperienced doctors rarely knew one end of a woman from the other.