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Cancer Quotes

Browse 2051 quotes about Cancer.

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Cancer Quotes

“Cancer, of course, is a teacher, and I'm writing down the lessons. It teaches empathy and compassion. It teaches patience and forbearance, with all that seems to be failing in the world. It teaches tolerance of the mess we and others make of our lives. It changes one's ambitions profoundly. It teaches the strengths to be found in community, which are different from the strengths to be found in individual striving. It teaches one to adapt.”

LifePurposeCommunityStrengthCancerMeaning
Book:Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays
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“The greatest incidence of breast cancer in american women appears within the ages of 40 to 55. These are the very years when women are portrayed in the popular media as fading and desexualized figures. Contrary to the media picture, I find myself as a woman of insight ascending into my highest powers, my greatest psychic strengths, and my fullest satisfactions. I am freer of the constraints and fears and indecisions of my younger years, and survival throughout these years has taught me how to value my own beauty, and how to look closely into the beauty of others. It has also taught me to value the lessons of survival, as well as my own perceptions. I feel more deeply, value those feelings more, and can put those feelings together with what I know in order to fashion a vision of and pathway toward true change.”

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Book:The Cancer Journals
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“Like Mom, Zoe thought–like Mom used to. And that’s where they differed, for Zoe wrote quiet poetry suffused with twilight and questions. It’s not even good poetry, she thought. I don’t have talent, it’s her. I should be the one ill; she has so much to offer, so much life. “You’re a dark one,” her mother said sometimes with amused wonder. “You’re a mystery.”

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Book:The Silver Kiss
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“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Play-ers. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”

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Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
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“His bridge partner of ten years arrives and brings him a pamphlet on holistic approaches to treating cancer. Has he met my dad —Jimmy Dean sausage's biggest buyer? The bridge partner asks me how my kids are doing. He thinks I'm my brother Christian. I tell him my daughter is becoming an accomplished hair stylist and colorist, which my niece is. Two more bridge players come up and ask to pray over Dad. I start to imagine a Christian rock group named the Fundamentalist Bridge Players. Then his most foul-mouthed friend, who he has played golf with for years, stops by. He’s been born again since his wife died a year ago. He tells my dad, "We have to get you right with God," and forces us all to hold hands and pray over my dad around his hospital bed. Another friend comes and brings him Ensure. My dad has said a thousand times that he can't eat, but he is knocking down those Ensures. This guy asks me, "Is your sister Polly coming?" "We are coming in shifts," I say.”

FamilyDyingCancerTransgenderHospiceAging ParentsMistaken IdentityTrans ManWhite Lies
Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
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“An especially close friend inquired ‘is it that you’re afraid you’ll never see England again?’ As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness. I’ll do the facing of hard facts, thanks. Don’t you be doing it too . . . ‘Yes, I suppose a time comes when you have to consider letting go.’ How true, and how crisp a summary of what I had just said to myself. But again there was an unreasonable urge to have a kind of monopoly on, or a sort of veto over, what was actually sayable. -Mortality”

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Author:Christopher Hitchens
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“We were always waiting for the drop. That tense feeling in the house was an intangible change in the cadence of our life, like the pause in the middle of a serious conversation as you wait for the waiter to clear each plate off the table.”

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Book:Irishman Dies from Stubbornness: Unbelievable Truths Behind the Life That Launched the Viral Obituary of Christopher Clifford Connors
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“Dr. Winn, Nancy is about as sick as a person can be. I don't know if we will be able to get her into remission." He paused, momentarily looked out the window, and before reengaging, took a quick gasp-like breath that could be heard across the room. "If we can't achieve remission, she won't last the week . . . I am so very sorry." His definitive words were like the period at the end of the sentence. Final. No, they were worse. They were like the space after the period at the end of a sentence at the end of the paragraph at the end of the essay. Nothing more to add. Nothing more to say.”

DeathDyingCancer
Book:Night Reflections: A True Story of Friendship, Love, Cancer, and Survival
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“I remember clearly in the hospital how I felt this strange closeness with God, how I did not feel like dry grass. I was becoming less and less, but I becoming less and less, but I was not reduced to nothing God's love was everywhere, sticking to everything. Love was in my husband's hand on my back, steadying me, a lightness under my feet, all over Zach's velvety wars. I flushed with embarrassment when I described this feeling to my friends, stumbling as I tried to explain its sudden appearance (Wasn't it there before?), that love itself was suddenly more real to me than my own thoughts. Despair was never far away, but somehow the seams of the universe had come undone, and all the splendid, ragged edges were showing. And they brought me close than I've e ed been to the truth of this experiment— living— and how the horror and the beauty of it feels almost blinding.”

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Author:Kate Bowler
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“When you died, you died in small doses. You had trouble speaking. You forgot who was beside you. You were suddenly furious and in a panic of outrage. You wished you could be saintly. You wished you weren't so weak. You suddenly felt better and fooled yourself into believing that a miracle was about to happen. Well, wasn't that all a dirty rotten thing to pull on somebody.”

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Book:The House of Broken Angels
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“I heard a lot about the idea of dying "with dignity" while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn't actually feel it was undignified for my mother's body to fail--that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on and off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn't want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn't want to pretend she wasn't going to die.”

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Book:The Long Goodbye
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“Jesus didn’t have to extend His love. He didn’t have to think of me when He went up on that cross. He didn’t have to rewrite my story from one of beauty to one of brokenness and create a whole new brand of beauty. He simply didn’t have to do it, but He did. He bought me. He bought me that day He died, and He showed His power when He overcame death and rose from the grave. He overcame my death in that moment. He overcame my fear of death in that unbelievable, beautiful moment, and the fruit of that death, that resurrection, and that stunning grace is peace. It is the hardest peace, because it is brutal. Horribly brutal and ugly, and we want to look away, but it is the greatest, greatest story that ever was. And it was, and it is.”

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Book:The Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life's Hard
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“In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one’s final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.” People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.”

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Author:Atul Gawande
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“We Let the Boat Drift I set out for the pond, crossing the ravine where seedling pines start up like sparks between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine. The grass in the field would make a second crop if early autumn rains hadn't washed the goodness out. After the night's hard frost it makes a brittle rustling as I walk. The water is utterly still. Here and there a black twig sticks up. It's five years today, and even now I can't accept what cancer did to him -- not death so much as the annihilation of the whole man, sense by sense, thought by thought, hope by hope. Once we talked about the life to come. I took the Bible from the nightstand and offered John 14: "I go to prepare a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said. "But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" And he wept. My neighbor honks and waves driving by. She counsels troubled students; keeps bees; her goats follow her to the mailbox. Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddles rested across our laps; glittering drops fell randomly from their tips. The light around us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant- let us get quite close before it dove, coming up after a long time, and well away from humankind”

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Book:Otherwise: new and selected poems
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“I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)”

LoveLifeDeathMotherPoetryHateGriefHealingDyingNew YorkSonPoemConflictLetting GoCancerMemoirGrievingPoemsDeath And DyingDeath Of A Loved OneVersesMountainsAlcoholismSoul SearchingLove And HateDaughtersMemoirsVerseDeath And LoveDeath And SicknessColon CancerDying At HomeGrieving The Loss Of A MotherBarbara BlatnerDeath And SonNew York QuarterlyDeath And DaughtersVerse Memoir
Author:Barbara Blatner
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“oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)”

LoveLifeDeathMotherPoetryHateGriefHealingDyingNew YorkSonPoemConflictLetting GoCancerMemoirGrievingPoemsDeath And DyingDeath Of A Loved OneVersesMountainsAlcoholismSoul SearchingLove And HateDaughtersMemoirsVerseDeath And LoveDeath And SicknessColon CancerDying At HomeGrieving The Loss Of A MotherBarbara BlatnerDeath And SonNew York QuarterlyDeath And DaughtersVerse Memoir
Book:The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
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“...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)”

LoveLifeDeathMotherPoetryHateGriefHealingDyingNew YorkSonPoemConflictCancerMemoirGrievingPoemsDeath And DyingDeath Of A Loved OneVersesMountainsAlcoholismDaughtersMemoirsVerseDeath And LoveDeath And SicknessColon CancerDying At HomeGrieving The Loss Of A MotherBarbara BlatnerDeath And SonNew York QuarterlyDeath And DaughtersVerse Memoir
Book:The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
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“blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)”

LoveDeathMotherPoetryHateGriefHealingDyingSonPoemConflictCancerPoemsDeath And DyingDeath Of A Loved OneVersesDaughtersMemoirsVerseDeath And LoveDeath And SicknessColon CancerGrieving The Loss Of A MotherAlchoholismBarbara BlatnerDeath And SonNew York QuarterlyGrievindeath And Daughters
Book:The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death
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“Remember that for millions of years natural selection favored women who devoted whatever extra energy they had toward reproduction, partly through the action of reproductive hormones such as estrogen. Natural selection, however, never geared women's bodies for coping with long-term surfeits of energy, estrogen, and other related hormones. As a result, women today are very different and vastly more at risk of developing cancer than mothers from long ago because their bodies are still functioning as they evolved to have as many surviving children as possible.”

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Book:The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease
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