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"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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"The good thing about having this illness is that it allows me to be a little bit crazy."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Why should I have been surprised?Hunters walk the forestwithout a sound.The hunter, strapped to his rifle,the fox on his feet of silk,the serpent on his empire of muscles-all move in a stillness,hungry, careful, intent.Just as the cancerentered the forest of my body,without a sound."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every medicine is vain."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Behind all your stories is always your mother's story. Because hers is where yours begin."
Family
"If you don't have the support and love and caring and connection that you get from a family, you don't have much at all."
Family
"Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive."
Relationship
"This is part of what a family is about, not just love, but letting others know there's someone who is watching out for them. It's what I missed so much when my mother died-what I call your 'spiritual security'-knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame."
Family
"Now that child reminds me of something our sages taught. When a baby comes into the world, it's hands are clenched, right? Like this?"He made a fist."Why? Because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say 'The whole world is mine.'"But when an old person dies, how does he do so? With his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson."What lesson? I asked.He stretched open his empty fingers."We can take nothing with us."
Wisdom
"He cried that night for all that he had lost, but he would say it taught him a valuable lesson: that holding on to things "will only break your heart."
Loss
"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."
Family
"She put one hand on mine. "When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times."
Connection
"Then he commandeered the floor, shooting back and forth like some hot Latin lover. When he finished, everyone applauded. He could have stayed in that moment forever."
Social
"You must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it."
Healing
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