Quotes about illness
Shannon L. Alder -
Feelings are something you have not something you are.
Herodotus -
Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change.
Shannon L. Alder -
I am not afraid to die I am only afraid of saying goodbye to you forever.
Shannon L. Alder -
victimnoun \ˈvik-təm\ 1. The moment you tell everyone you have a mental disorder, in order to excuse your behavior.
Audre Lorde - The Cancer Journals
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
Joseph Conrad -
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
Shannon L. Alder -
A best friend is the only one that walks into your life when the world has walked out.
Shannon L. Alder -
Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don't know any other way to live than by extremes because thier emotional theromastat is broken.
Goldie Hawn -
The lotus is the most beautiful flower, whose petals open one by one. But it will only grow in the mud. In order to grow and gain wisdom, first you must have the mud --- the obstacles of life and its suffering. ... The mud speaks of the common ground that humans share, no matter what our stations in life. ... Whether we have it all or we have nothing, we are all faced with the same obstacles: sadness, loss, illness, dying and death. If we are to strive as human beings to gain more wisdom, more k
Jalaluddin Rumi - Rumi: Swallowing the Sun: Poems Translated from Persian
SUDDEN RESURRECTION! Endless mercy!Blazing fire in the thickets of thought! Today you came laughing Unlocking dungeons Came to the meek Like god’s grace and bountyYou are the antechamber to the sunYou are the hope’s prerequisite You are sought Seeker Terminus PrincipiaYou pulse in every chest adorn every idea then permit their realizationSpirit- spring, irreplaceableDelight of action and cognition.All the rest is pretext, fraud- the former, illness; the latter, cureWe’re jaundiced by that fraudH
Ann Napolitano - A Good Hard Look
God is not here to be demanded of, begged from, or criticized. He hands out burdens to those who are strong enough to carry them, and I feel profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of lining up with the other invalids and asking for mine to be alleviated.
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
THE MAXIMS OF MEDICINE Before you examine the body of a patient,Be patient to learn his story.For once you learn his story,You will also come to knowHis body.Before you diagnose any sickness,Make sure there is no sickness in the mind or heart.For the emotions in a man’s moon or sun,Can point to the sickness inAny one of his other parts.Before you treat a man with a condition,Know that not all cures can heal all people.For the chemistry that works on one patient,May not work for the next,Because
Suzy Kassem - Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Love is a chemical reaction,But it cannot be fully understood or defined by science.And though a body cannot exist without a soul,It too cannot be fully understood or defined by science.Love is the most powerful form of energy,But science cannot decipher its elements.Yet the best cure for a sick soul is love,But even the most advanced physicianCannot prescribe it as medicine.INCOMPLETE SCIENCE by Suzy Kassem
Christopher Hitchens - Mortality
In one way, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
Henri Matisse -
I didn't expect to recover from my second operation but since I did, I consider that I'm living on borrowed time. Every day that dawns is a gift to me and I take it in that way. I accept it gratefully without looking beyond it. I completely forget my physical suffering and all the unpleasantness of my present condition and I think only of the joy of seeing the sun rise once more and of being able to work a little bit, even under difficult conditions.
Beth Ramsay - #Networking is people looking for people looking for people
You must take the time to do something that brings you joy. If you are saying to yourself, “I can’t do that because I have to pick up the kids, and run my business, and … and … who’s got time for fun? Are you insane?” If you don’t have time for fun, you’ll be forced to take time for illness. Then what?
Matthew Williamson - From the Inside Out
..and though my internal organs were Barry White, my stamina had skipped CDs and decided to be more Vanilla Ice.
Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar
I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life.
David T. Dellinger - Revolutionary Nonviolence: Essays
This is a diseased world in which it is impossible for anyone to be fully human. One way or another, everyone who lives in the modern world is sick or maladjusted.
Audre Lorde - The Cancer Journals
I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined ... imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness.
Nikki Rowe -
I find myself enjoying being alone a lot of the time, people come and people go and you have to find a way to be ok with both.
Nikki Rowe -
Maybe if we love ourselves healthy we will all heal?
Nikki Rowe -
Theres a remarkable amount of strength residing in those who move forward without being able to physically move. Ones that carry the weight of illness or a disability, they battle wars most know nothing about. They are the true warriors of the world, the ones who have every reason to quit but never do.
Carrie Fisher - Wishful Drinking
One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness an
Oliver Bowden - Assassin's Creed: The Secret Crusade
They do not learn, fixed in their ways as they are. You are naïve tothink otherwise. It’s an illness, Assassin, for which there is but one cure.’‘You’re wrong. And that’s why you must be put to rest.’‘Am I not unlike those precious books you seek to save? A source of knowledgewith which you disagree? Yet you’re rather quick to steal my life.’‘A small sacrifice to save many. It is necessary.
Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre
You are no ruin sir--no lighting-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.
Anna C. Salter - And Other Sex Offenders
Once, in a three-day taping that included several sadists, the material was so overwhelming that both the film crew and I got sick - I with a sinus infection, and the entire film crew with a flu so severe they had to delay their departure from the motel. Our immune systems had weakened, I believe, from the beating out souls had taken.
Erik Pevernagie -
When illness and old age are no longer indulgent and strength is irrevocably seeping away, brightness fades insidiously away from the light of the day and time only betrays reckless evanescence. (“Into a new life”)
Amanda Leigh - Holiday Hospital Stay Poetry Collection 2012: Original Poetry
If you have a strong stomachread on.
Nikki Rowe -
I have this one little life to live with, it's not the plan I had in mind but I can accept its the calling of my soul. The irony in gaining freedom through the heartbreak of stillness.
Nikki Rowe -
what once cause catastrophe in my life has now become the catalyst for my direction.
Nikki Rowe -
The girl was a gypsy before an illness took control of her legs, now she watches in awe the world pass by whilst stillness teaches her about inner strength.
John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
Lang Leav - Love & Misadventure
Saving YouThe darkness takes him over, the sickness pulls him in; his eyes—a blown out candle, I wish to go with him.Sometimes I see a flicker— a light that shone from them; I hold him to me tightly, before he's gone again.
Lisa Kleypas - Seduce Me at Sunrise
A weak but steady throb lay beneath Kev's searching fingertips. Win's heartbeat...the pulse that sustained his universe.
R. M. Drake -
Somewhere inside that hurting body, there is something better, something stronger, something real.
Criss Jami - Killosophy
I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.
Kaimana Wolff - Broken Sleep
Being sick successfully is not included in society’s panoply of worthy goals.
Sanchita Pandey - Cancer to Cure
Life in itself is a big classroom - so learn all the chapters of life well. This chapter of illness is but only one chapter. Learn whatever it has come to teach you and move on in life.
Donna Goddard - Waldmeer
Your body would not get sick if you held no thought of resentment. It is neither good nor bad of itself. If we hold anything against anyone, we will suffer ourselves.
Maria Elena - Eternal Youth
You are the illness I will never cure. You are the poem I will never write. You are the thought I will never finish. You are the text I will never read.
Criss Jami - Killosophy
A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.
Jude Morgan - Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets
Keats was getting a reputation just when he was too ill to appreciate it or build on it: his country was taking notice of him just when he would have to leave it.
Ellyn Bache - The Art of Saying Goodbye
It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.
Lauren Oliver - Delirium
Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.
Spike Milligan -
(On his gravestone): "I told you I was ill".
Julian Barnes - Arthur & George
He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.
Shaun Hick -
Cancer gave me an understanding of the point of all this. To survive. Most of our lives it is easy but for the moments when it becomes difficult, when accident or sickness or sadness strikes, it's just about remembering one thing. You must simply survive.
Elizabeth Langston - Wishing for You
Strange how knowing our story had no happy ending had freed us to live in the moment. We weren’t guy and girl. We weren’t damaged and terminal. We were just now.
Justin Madson - Breathers
One of my pa...friends... isn't doing very well.""...Is your friend dying?""...Yes honey, he is.""That's sad.
Connie Kerbs -
Three, 300, or 3,000 - these are the number of unknown days, each far too little and yet too much at the same time, to see an irrevocably declined loved one languish and suffer, with that bittersweet release lingering in the doorway, but never quite being sent all the way in, to comfort and carry our loved one to that Better Place.” ― Connie Kerbs
Colbert - Wendy Staley
By the time we hit our forties, we've all known pain--it's been layered on us like so many coats of paint. Who's to say which heartbreak is the greatest: Losing a child or never having a romantic relationship? Surviving cancer or having a mentally ill son? All painful life events gouge deep furrows and cause emotions to bleed out of us--shock, sorrow, and dismay. Through these tragedies, we are constantly rediscovering ourselves, peeling off the personas we've created to fit in socially and reac
Patrick Ness - A Monster Calls
I couldn't stand the waiting anymore. I couldn't stand how alone it made me feel."And a part of you wished it would just end, said the monster, even if it meant losing her.And the nightmare began. The nightmare that always ended with -"I let her go," Conor choked out. "I could have held on but I let her go."And that, the monster said, is the truth."I didn't mean it, though!" Conor said, his voice rising. "I didn't mean to let her go! And now it's for real! Now she's going to die and it's my faul
Charlotte Brontë -
My sister Emily first declined. The details of her illness are deep-branded in my memory, but to dwell on them, either in thought or narrative, is not in my power. Never in all her life had she lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally, she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with anguish of wonde
Shannon L. Alder -
Sometimes what a person expresses in their eyes is more than all the books you could read on suffering.
Laura Anderson Kurk - Perfect Glass
I’m not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connected…or that no one can outrun destiny…or that all roads lead to truth and coincidence is a lie to distract us? The reason I was in this place no longer mattered. The harsh reality stared me in the face and demanded an immediate decision. Walk away and blame it on my age. Or stay and try to help a woman who had slowly become my friend over the last few weeks.
Aleksandar Hemon - The Book of My Lives
One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous l
Josh Lanyon - The Dark Tide
It wasn't merely fatigue. although it continued to worry me how tired i was all the time. I had a strange sense of missing something, of being in the wrong place - no matter where I was.
Wendy Law-Yone -
It isn't discomfort, or dis-ease as he put it. It's this aching, throbbing, god-awful incurable pain - and it's known as life. When will the doctors learn: It isn't death that's the disease.
Patrick Carman - Skeleton Creek
Physically, mentally, emotionally -- it seems like every part of me is broken in one way or another.
Rebecca McNutt - Super 8: The Sequel to Smog City
Tell yourselves whatever you’d like, but I’m afraid it doesn’t make it true,” Mearth sighed, beginning to look impatient. “Step aside Mandy, I have to remediate him, otherwise you’ll find yourself in a whole mess of trouble.”“You can’t do this, it’s wrong,” Mandy insisted.“You don’t have a choice, Mandy! Either you let his life compromise the lives of everybody else in the world, or you let me remediate him and get it over with,” Mearth icily declared.“…Do what she says, Mandy Valems….” Alecto a
Michaela Haze - The Bleeders
When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?
Kay Redfield Jamison - An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and
Jean-Yves Leloup - Compassion and Meditation: The Spiritual Dynamic between Buddhism and Christianity
[W]e need not become fixated upon our own suffering, whatever its origin. We offer it up, thus participating in the well-being of the universe. When we experience an illness or depression not as our own but as the universe’s, we are one with all beings who experience this kind of suffering. (78)
Shannon L. Alder -
God didn’t design your life so you would constantly fall down, but he does hope that you will be brought to your knees.
Robert Galbraith - The Cuckoo's Calling
It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happening to Bristow's mother... sometimes nillness rose to meet you out of nowhere, like a concrete road slamming your skull apart.
Northern Adams - Mickey and the Gargoyle
If you tell someone you have depression, they will often say, "Oh, I've been depressed before, too." The difference lies between being depressed and having depression. Everyone's been depressed at one time or another, but these are far from being the same things. One is a passing mood. The other is a chronic illness that does not come and go, ebb and flow, is here one day and gone the next.The difference between being depressed and having depression is that one is a mood and the other is an illn
Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool
Since her retirement from teaching Miss Beryl's health had in many respects greatly improved, despite her advancing years. An eighth-grade classroom was an excellent place to snag whatever was in the air in the way of illness. Also depression, which, Miss Beryl believed, in conjunction with guilt, opened the door to illness. Miss Beryl didn't know any teachers who weren't habitually guilty and depressed--guilty they hadn't accomplished more with their students, depressed that very little more wa
William Styron - Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self--to the mediating intellect--as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, "the blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its
Marian Keyes - The Mystery of Mercy Close
People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they don't. And it doesn't matter if the sickness is cancer or if it's depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop. Sometimes the alternative stuff works and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you wonder if no outside interference makes any difference at all; if an illness is like a storm, if it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, depending on ho
Laura Anderson Kurk - Perfect Glass
I’d felt this before, when my granddad was in the hospital before he died. We all camped out in the waiting room, eating our meals together, most of us sleeping in the chairs every night. Family from far-flung places would arrive at odd hours and we’d all stand and stretch, hug, get reacquainted, and pass the babies around.A faint, pale stream of beauty and joy flowed through the heavy sludge of fear and grief. It was kind of like those puddles of oil you see in parking lots that look ugly until
Shannon L. Alder -
God doesn’t put that much prep into something that is insignificant.
Paul Kalanithi - When Breath Becomes Air
I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.
Shannon L. Alder -
Never sever ties with a family member you once loved. Each of you might be on different spiritual paths, but both trails are leading you home.
Shannon L. Alder -
People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Notes from Underground
I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.
Omar Gamal Said -
Here’s what's breaking into my imagination and whatever is in there; that you are not afraid you’ve seen, is yours to take.
Cindee Snider Re - Discovering Hope: Beginning the Journey Toward Hope in Chronic Illness
What if illness - the stripping away of our health, our dreams, our understanding of who we are and what our future holds - is really a gift - God offering Himself to us unencumbered by all the noise, all the things that clutter our hearts and so easily fill our days? Because what if that quiet, stripped-away space is where hope is found? Where God leans in close whispering love to our weary souls until it becomes as familiar as the beating of our own hearts?
Shannon L. Alder - 300 Questions LDS Couples Should Ask for a More Vibrant Marriage
Not every person wants the prettiest, smartest, talented or spiritually uplifting person to build a life with. Sometimes we just want that special someone that makes sense, puts up with us, has patience, comes without drama, gives us focus and is willing to run with our half-baked ideas.
Edie Littlefield Sundby - The Mission Walker: I was given three months to live...
This story is not about avoiding death, but living life.
Nikki Rowe -
Your attitude will either make or break you, we cannot change fate and the tragedies that enter our lives but we can choose how we want them to change us.
Kyle West - The Wasteland Chronicles: Omnibus Edition
Even if such beauty wasn't meant to be in a world so fallen as ours, that didn't take away from its beauty. It only made it more beautiful.
Piero Scaruffi -
Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
Nikki Rowe -
Art is my cure to all this madness, sadness and loss of belonging in the world & through it I'll walk myself home.
Fidel Castro -
The ever more sophisticated weapons piling up in the arsenals of the wealthiest and the mightiest can kill the illiterate, the ill, the poor and the hungry, but they cannot kill ignorance, illness, poverty or hunger.
Vivian Amis -
Problems are solved from the inside out not the other way around.
Masuji Ibuse - Black Rain
..there was a moment when the living room vanished and I saw a great, mushroom-shaped cloud rising into a blue sky. I saw it quite distinctly.
Alanna Mitchell - Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths
The predominant cancer metaphor is war. We fight cancer, usually valiantly. We attack tumors and try to annihilate them and bring out our arsenals to do that, and so on. It's us against cancer. This metaphor has come in for its share of criticism within the ethical, psychological and even oncological disciplines. A main concern is that when someone dies of cancer, the message that remains is that that person just hasn't fought hard enough, was not a brave enough soldier against the ultimate foe,
Sunday Adelaja -
If a person refuses to develop his potential, it can lead to nervous or mental disorders, somatic diseases and personal degradation
Karen Quan - liQUID PROse QUOtes
This girl who's slept a hundred years has something after all. It's called Centuryitis, and it has turned me into a man. Oh, what will mamma think when she sees me?!-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz
Krystal Sutherland - A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares
Esther so badly wanted to save her father, to bring him back from the half death that had become his life. Every time he reminded her that he couldn’t be saved, Esther’s heart broke a little more.
Tom Hodgkinson - Bored
Pain will never leave us. Instead of putting energy into destroying pain, we need to put energy into creating pleasure.
T.F. Hodge - From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
Depression, which lives below the horizon, is the result of painting and entertaining negative imagery - most of which has not taken place in reality. Get up, move, and appreciate that which is given. What is lacking is usually material and heavily influenced by external forces. Don't play yourself, save yourself.
Sanhita Baruah -
The 2ams have held my hopes all these years as I calm my nerves down for there would only be three more hours for the world to wake up to my screams and wails of excruciating pain.Probably the drug store would open if I wait for three more hours then.8am and the doc would prescribe me a few medicines over whatsapp.I would make three cups of tea by then. I would quiet my mouth as it would bite on my arm.By twelve I would finally be relieved as the meds would work.But it's only midnight now... wis
Hippocrates - Aphorisms
Persons who have a painful affection in any part of the body, and are in a great measure sensible of the pain, are disordered in intellect.
Richard Smyth - Wild Ink
My pains, sometimes seem like witch hunters: confess, confess, confess. Like a heavy stone on my rib-cage.Confess to what?And, of course, I would confess, if only I knew what it was they wanted to hear.
Elizabeth Haynes - Human Remains
Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that's happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity - which they interpret as laziness.
Patti Smith - Woolgathering
I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.
Jennifer Starzec - and a Spinal Cord Injury
As I sat up I turned my head to the side, but immediately straightened it again when I felt a sharp pain shoot through my neck.