Cancer Quotes

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.

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.

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

But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.

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

God had not abandoned us. He was actively working behind the scenes, when I had no means or spirit to fight.

K. Howard Joslin

God dramatically slew one monstrous opponent and then threw us into the arena against a stronger and more vicious foe.

K. Howard Joslin

She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant

For whatever time I have to live, I intend to enjoy myself." - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live.

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

Although often perceived as one disease, cancer is a number of diseases subsumed within one diagnostic label.

Mary Burton Maggie Watson

Each appointment brought fear, uncertainty and discouragement. Ann’s constant concern was, What if I have cancer?

K. Howard Joslin

I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.

Even now, it's still hard for him to say it. I don't blame him. It's an icky word. Why couldn't whoever was in charge of naming things call cancer 'sugar' and sugar, 'cancer'? People might not eat so much of the stuff then. And it's so much more pleasant to die of sugar.

Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.

50,000-63,000 individuals in the United States and 19,000-25,000 in the UK die prematurely from cancer annually due to insufficient vitamin D.

She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.

In God's strength I could battle the giants. Alone, I was just a grasshopper.S

Many patients with cancer are depressed, yet depression is not the cause of cancer.

Cancer doesn’t give a shit how much you want to live. If it wants to kill you, it will.

A.S. King

You die in the middle of your life.

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

When one person gets cancer, the whole family gets cancer.

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

Life is too precious to waste any of it regretting the past.

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

Because really, what do you have to lose? Your life? That's no big deal, I promise you. When you find out you might die, you're finally allowed to live like you never have before. If you lose your life while living the shit out of it, then you've done the best you could, and you shouldn't worry about death. When you're dead, you can't screw up. But while you're here, all you have are a few things to call your own. You have your integrity, your family, and your hope for the future. These are important and you should keep them somewhere safe where you'll remember them.

I've learned so much during my time with cancer. It's taught me a lot about who I am. It revealed to me my true goals and priorities. It introduced me to a brand new world where time isn't wasted, and important things aren't left unsaid. All the while, the superfluities of life are ignored and forgotten. Because I now understand how a person should act, whether confronted by death or not. And it's a shame that's what it takes to scare someone into becoming a conducive, meritable human being.

We can look at our tattoos from cancer treatment as awful reminders of a ghastly time in our lives, or we can use them as reminders of what God brought us through.

Nothing takes God by surprise, not even cancer.

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...

The devil sought to destroy me and discredit my testimony. But God wanted me where I would testify to others about his saving power.

Cancer may have blindsided you, but it didn't blindside God.~ Strength Renewed

The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.

Cancer is finite. God is way bigger.

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

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

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.

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.

Stay positive, stay strong, stay together and just keep going!

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

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!

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

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

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

In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher

Siddhartha Mukherjee

She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.

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.

When you walk this earth on borrowed time, each day on the calendar is a beloved friend you know for only a short time.

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.

Dear Whoever-that-just-found-out-that-they-have-a-terminal-illness, don't let that put you down. Technically, we are all dying.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

Christopher Lasch

The failure to accept cancer as a systemic disease is one of the greatest failures in modern medicine.

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

Please don’t preach at me—I feel bad enough already.

When life is going according to plan, we don't stop to question our daily habits...Maybe it's time to sift through our lives.

There's only one way to become an eagle, and that's to be born an eagle.

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.

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