#cancer

Death straps me to the hospital bed, claws its way onto my chest and sits there.I didn't know it would hurt this much. I didn't know that everything good that's ever happened in my life would be emptied out by it. ↗

— Jenny Downham

#dying #death

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. ↗

— John Green

#death-of-a-loved-one #death-of-a-teenager #illness #death

Ann prayed because of a gut-wrenching, throbbing pain in her soul. She urgently begged the Lord for her life. ↗

— K. Howard Joslin

#life #pain #prayer #soul #trails

I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was. ↗

— Jane Smiley

#depression #life

If it's possible to send a message from heaven, I'll get one to you. ↗

— Lurlene McDaniel

#heaven #true-love #love

CELL Now look objectively. You have to admit the cancer cell is beautiful. If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty, with its mauve centre and pink petals of if a cover for a pulpy thirties sci-fi magazine. How striking: as an alien, a success, all purple eye and jelly tentacles and spines, or are they gills, creeping around on granular Martian dirt red as the inside of the body, while its tender walls expand and burst, its spores scatter elsewhere, take root, like money, drifting like a fiction or miasma in and out of people's brains, digging themselves industriously in. The lab technician says, It has forgotten how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. to take more. to eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on doing those things forever. Such desires are not unknown. Look in the mirror. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#poetry #beauty

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

#john-green #the-fault-in-our-stars #cancer

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#jewish #mozart #race #racism #shakespeare

I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. Which isn't being pious. Just practical. Cancer may cool you, but the other's sure to. ↗

— Truman Capote

#truth #cancer

Chuck Norris’s tears cure cancer. Too bad he’s never cried. ↗

— Ian Spector

#medical-treatment #cancer