Jumbled Quotes for Here and Now

"No man is an island, entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thine own or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee." (John Donne, 1624)

From the Guardian, April 11, 2020

"Many of us are getting a glimpse of dystopia. Others are living it." (Viet Thanh Nguyen -- link)

"We are in the zombie apocalypse, which my students have been writing about for well over a decade, so young people are mentally prepared. Is a virus not a kind of zombie, a quasi life-form moving in and out of inertness? It is zombie time: the virus can’t be transmitted when all of its hosts have died. So we are all social-­distancing; that is, pretending to have died, lying very still, so the virus—the shooter in the school—won’t get us." (Lorrie Moore--link)

"As the pandemic upended our lives, people around me worried that they were having trouble focusing and being productive. It was, I suspected, because we were all doing other, more important work. When you’re recovering from an illness, pregnant or young and undergoing a growth spurt, you’re working all the time, especially when it appears you’re doing nothing. Your body is growing, healing, making, transforming and labouring below the threshold of consciousness. As we struggled to learn the science and statistics of this terrible scourge, our psyches were doing something equivalent. We were adjusting to the profound social and economic changes, studying the lessons disasters teach, equipping ourselves for an unanticipated world." (Rebecca Solnit -- link)

"Trying to translate your old social habits to Zoom or FaceTime is like going vegetarian and proceeding to glumly eat a diet of just tofurkey, rather than cooking varied, creative, and flavorful meals with fruits and vegetables." (Ashley Fetters -- link)

"The pandemic will eventually end; the economy will eventually recover. But democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we’re much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize." (Paul Krugman -- link)

"The coronavirus, Passover and Holy Week remind us that suffering is part of the human condition; we all face the prospect of death. But rarely has our own contingency confronted so many of us so vividly and so urgently." (Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest -- link)

original photos copyright © 2020 mae sander 
for mae food dot blog spot dot com.