Quotes by American Authors - Page 6

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live
Rachele Baker
For whatever time I have to live, I intend to enjoy myself." - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live.
Rachele Baker
And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
Chuck Klosterman
But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.
John Green
The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer
Dan Simmons
Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.
John Green
But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.
John Green
Yes?’ he asked, looking at me over the sheet.‘I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.’‘Oh, a writer, eh?’‘Yes.’‘Are you sure?’‘No, I’m not.’‘What do you write?’‘Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.’‘A novel, eh?’‘Yes.’‘What’s the name of it?’‘”The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.”‘‘Oh, I like that. What’s it about?’‘Everything.’‘Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?’‘Yes.’‘How about my wife?’‘She’s in there too.
Charles Bukowski
My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war with a predetermined winner
John Green
The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.
Dan Simmons
The pain he feels in his own gut is either something to do with the caffeine, or the stress of realizing that if it's not snipers or blindness stealing your children, it's cancer coming to snipe your wife, and there's not a fucking thing a guy can do about any of it except to drop to his knees and pray, to pretend like someone or something that gives a shit is on teh other end of the line, to pretend anything, like you did when you were a kid until the pretending seems real, because without that all you've got for comfort is what's in front of your face...
Scott Wrobel
In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:"There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and — no time to think — out you go."You descend. You hit the ground....But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to?...No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't?"The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.“It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.
Chuck Palahniuk
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.
Barbara Ehrenreich
You die in the middle of your life.
John Green
Cancer doesn’t give a shit how much you want to live. If it wants to kill you, it will.
A.S. King
Many patients with cancer are depressed, yet depression is not the cause of cancer.
David S. Bell
He was one of the few people who had spoken to me as though his words were not rocks and I was not glass.
Meredith Norton
The failure to accept cancer as a systemic disease is one of the greatest failures in modern medicine.
Michael Lam
I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
Christopher Lasch
I am the sky and nothing can stick to me. The sky is open and vast and stays unchanged no matter what; it is always the sky. A storm can roll through it, an airplane can roar through, and it is always the sky.
Geralyn Lucas
When you walk this earth on borrowed time, each day on the calendar is a beloved friend you know for only a short time.
Judith Hooper
Why can someoneget so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick?It’s like the world’s longest exorcism. It doesn’t make sense that I canchat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billionsof dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollarsto just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking fi gure outhow to cure cancer without torturing people.
Julie Halpern
She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.
Gillian Flynn
In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Initially, after David’s diagnosis, I would cringe when I readbooks or articles by cancer survivors who stated that cancer hadbeen a gift in their lives. How could all that David endured beviewed as a gift? The invasive surgery, the weeks of chemotherapyand radiation: a gift?Yet, after the cancer, David would often reach for my hand andsay, “If it is cancer that is responsible for our new relationship, thenit was all worth it.” And I’d reluctantly agree that cancer had been agift in our lives. We’d both seen the other alternative: patients andsurvivors who had become bitter and angry, and neither one of uswanted to become that.
Mary Potter Kenyon
Bad news doesn't hurt as much, if you hear it in good company. It's like, if somebody pushes you out of a 5th floor window and you bounce off an awning, a car roof, and a pile of plastic garbage bags before you smash onto the pavement, you've got a pretty good chance of surviving.
Patricia Gaffney
Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.
Rebecca Skloot
Almost all the world is natural chemicals, so it really makes you re-think everything. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. But we only found 22 that have been tested in animal cancer tests out of this thousand. And of those, 17 are carcinogens. There are ten milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee and thats more carcinogens than you're likely to get from pesticide residues for a year!
Bruce Ames
You are so high in the tree.If you jumpyou will live a full lifewhile falling.You will get marriedto a hummingbirdand raise beautiful part- hummingbirds. You will die of cancerin mid-air. I will not lie. It will be painful. You are a brave little boyor girl.
Zachary Schomburg
Stay positive, stay strong, stay together and just keep going!
Tanya Masse
I'm not one of those people who think that cancer is some kind of jousting match. People live or die based on good medicine, good luck, and the grace of God. The people that die from it did not fail. The people who live will die another day.
Paul Acampora
There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.
John Green
What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.
John Green
Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely.
John Green
Cancer is a bitch that needs to get the crap smacked out of it. I intend to stand on the front lines with a big-ass bat.
Brenna Aubrey
Just because someone has cancer, it doesn't mean you stop laughing at them or making fun of them.
Tanya Masse
Cancer is WAY too serious to be taken seriously all the time.
Tanya Masse
Hormonal changes permanently alter the breast's structure. And when a pregnancy is terminated through abortion, the process is interrupted, which leaves cells in a sate of transition. And they say cells in this state have a very high risk of becoming cancerous. So the woman's chances of developing breast cancer later in life my be greatly increased.
Francine Rivers
The cancer bubble. It's almost like he's not here. Like he's on pause, and my life with him is on pause, and we're just waiting to see if somebody is going to hit play again or just stop the thing entirely.
Abigail Barnette
Instead of a bucket list Someday Challenge™ wants you to create your Someday Slate™, a list of the things that you have promised yourself to do, things that you planned to do someday! Completing your Someday Slate™ will get you started on finally living your passion now.
David A. Koop
Everyday is a good day, even when things are hard because we are still here, still fighting to live among the latter.
Lisa Kinsella
An ounce of cancer prevention is worth a ton of cancer cure.
Robert A. Wascher
I want to be remembered as a kid who went down fighting, and didn't really lose
Zach Sobiech
Why should I have been surprised?Hunters walk the forestwithout a sound.The hunter, strapped to his rifle,the fox on his feet of silk,the serpent on his empire of muscles—all move in a stillness,hungry, careful, intent.Just as the cancerentered the forest of my body,without a sound.
Mary Oliver
And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Love and laughter are two of the most important universal cancer treatments on the planet. Overdose on them.
Tanya Masse
I don’t know how,” I confessed, and I pulled my hand away so I wouldn’t hurt her in my frustration.She grabbed my hand and brought it back, this time pressing it to her heart.“I’m telling you how. You hold onto me. You trust me. You use me. You lean on me. You rely on me. You let me shelter you. You let me love you. All of you. Cancer. Fear. Sickness. Health. Better. Worse. All of you. And you’ll have all of me.
Amy Harmon
Everybody keeps talking about 'fighting' the cancer," he said, "everybody keeps telling me to fight for my life, to fight the disease, and how their uncle won the battle against cancer and their cousin won the fight against cancer and black blah blah blah.""Okay...and?""I'm not fighting," he said. "It's already inside me... and I'm not going to fight. I'm going to be a good host, let it pass through me.. resist nothing. Sieve. Let it all pass through.
Amanda Palmer
Love will cost you dearly.And it will break your heart.But in the end, it will save the world.
Sarah Thebarge
She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.
Lisa Genova
Is that cancer curable or just treatable.
Tom Brokaw
These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.
Tom Brokaw
Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.
Tom Brokaw
He walked across the room and flicked a switch. A spotlight turned on, illuminating a laminated poster of a woman on his wall. He took a crayon from his pocket and began drawing on it. I could see smudges from past demonstrations. [. . .] His dashed lines crisscrossed the woman's chest as if he were planning a military maneuver on undulating terrain.
Kim van Alkemade
Emma shut her laptop and scowled at them. “I’m pink.”She wasn’t sure when her opinion of the color changed or why, but she now took offense to outsiders putting down the pink as much as she took offense to corporations abusing the color. What she once criticized she now understood. Despite all the exploitation, there was something intangible behind the pink, a sense of connectedness, and she wanted to embrace that camaraderie.
Lydia Michaels
According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.
John Green
Regarding his friend's insight after losing her spouse to cancer: "She told me she had plenty of people to do things with but nobody to do nothing with.
Peter Bach
Since cancer is an anaerobic growth, enhancing aerobic metabolism in a cancer patient is like shining daylight on a vampire.
Patrick Quillin
You gave me a forever within the numbered days and I'm grateful.
John Green