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"I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life."
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Personal Development


"Morrie was in a wheelchair full-time now, getting used to helpers lifting him like a heavy sack from the chair to the bed and the bed to the chair."
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Personal Development


"There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in."
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Personal Development


"In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them."
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Personal Development


"Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."
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Personal Development


"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."
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Personal Development


"Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying."
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Personal Development


"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."
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Personal Development


"I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don't read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent solider is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water."
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Personal Development


"ALS is like a lit candle: it melts your nerves and leaves your body a pile of wax.. you cannot support yourself standing.. you cannot sit up straight. By the end, if you are still alive.. your soul, perfectly awake, is imprisoned inside a limp husk.. like something from a science fiction movie, the man frozen inside his own flesh."
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More

"I'm in love with you, and I'm not in thebusiness of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returnedto dust, and I know the sun will swallowthe only earth we'll ever have, and I amin love with you."
Love

"The prank is entitled "Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm"."
Society

"Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention."
Emotion

"Mission accomplished' I said.Pudge my friend we are indefuckingstructable."
Strength

"I dislike the phrase 'Internet friends,' because it implies that people you know online aren't really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance."
Friendship

"When you're on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating."
Social

"You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was."
Childhood

"I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks over various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years."
Life

"Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we're still alone, each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together."
Experience

"When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself."
Identity
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