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"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while."
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
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The good thing about having this illness is that it allows me to be a little bit crazy."
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
"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
"I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys and my boxers between us, I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching " a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness of the moment, I cared at least enough. I wasn't sure whether I liked her, and doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out. Her on my bed, wide green eyes staring down at me. The enduring mystery of her sly, almost smirking, smile. Five layers between us."
Relationship
"But of course, the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another."
Philosophy
"We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers."
Power
"Thank you for letting me hijack your wish', I said.'Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa," he said."
Friendship
"I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you."
Legacy
"But alas, the world is not a wish-granting factory."
Reality
"Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn't have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?"
Identity
"You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to."
Communication
"It doesn't matter how long we've used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks-at least so far-are fairly limited in their awesomeness."
Technology
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Resilience
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