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"I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself."
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"Mary and Carrie and baby Grace and Ma had all had scarlet fever. The Nelsons across the creek had had it too, so there had been no one to help Pa and Laura."
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Personal Development
"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."
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Personal Development
"Cases of sickness made up a very small percentage which in my opinion was normal. However, propaganda pamphlets dropped from aircraft were telling the workers to feign illness, and detailed instructions were given to them on how to do it."
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Personal Development
"Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host."
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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
"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
"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
"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
"The good thing about having this illness is that it allows me to be a little bit crazy."
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"It is a dangerous thing to have instant access to your emotions."
Emotional
"Metaphor is embodied in language."
Language
"The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?"
Metaphor
"That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness."
Vision
"God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names."
God
"There's no end to the inventiveness of critics, I tell you. Because they can't write fiction, they put their impulse into their analysis of work."
Work
"The more my work improves or broadens or widens, the more surely I tame myself."
Work
"The knowledge that we have about what it is to be human that we have as a child is something we necessarily must lose."
Knowledge
"Some of the words and symbols and images from childhood will continually be part and parcel of my personality."
Childhood
"To love it too much is to obscure and not see what is there."
Love
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