illness quotes

Chemotherapy isn’t good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, ‚Well that is a good thing because it’s supposed to be poison. If it’s making the tumor feel this queasy, then I’m OK with it.‘

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

There is nothing I fear more than waking up without a program that will help me bring a little happiness to those with no resources, those who are poor, illiterate, and ridden with terminal disease.

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

I’m not feeling very well – I need a doctor immediately. Ring the nearest golf course.

I think that cancer is a life form that exists out there, and it exists in us. I think even the concept of healing is a spiritual principle that we have to really look at. I think the word itself is something we ought to get rid of, because it implies that there is illness – that there is something wrong.

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing.

If you start to think of your physical and moral condition, you usually find that you are sick.

Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centred and even solipsistic.

When I go to the clinic next and sit with a tube in my arm and watch the poison go in, I’m in an attitude of abject passivity. It doesn’t feel like fighting at all; it just feels like submitting.

My gold, my money couldn’t stop cancer from appearing on my body. If they can’t save me, then I don’t need them.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

When we are well, we all have good advice for those who are ill.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

I was ill, and everyone could see it but me.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.