top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Illness quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy."

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

"There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in."
Explore more quotes by Mitch Albom

"None of us can undo what we've done, or relive a life already recorded. But, ... there is no such thing as "too late" in life."

"If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you have different set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.Your values must be alike. And the biggest of those values... the belief in the importance of your marriage."

"Heaven . . . is the same feeling. . . . No fear. No dark. When you know you are loved . . . that's the light."

"We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.And facing death changes that?"Oh, yes. You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials."

"Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can't explain, something that created it all at the end of the search."And no matter how far they try to go the other way " to extend life, play around with the genes, clone this, clone that, live to one hundred and fifty " at some point, life is over. And then what happens? When the life comes to an end?I shrugged."You see?He leaned back. He smiled."When you come to the end, that's where God begins."

"Sacrifice is a part of life. It's supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to aspire to."

".. I thought about him now and then, the things he had taught me about 'being human' and 'relating to others;, but it was always in the distance, as if from another life.. .. The people who might have told me were long forgotten, their phone numbers buried in some packed-away box in the attic."
bottom of page