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"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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"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
"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
"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
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Scientists have an expression for hypotheses that are utterly useless even for learning from mistakes. They refer to them as being "not even wrong." Most so-called spiritual discourse is of this type."
Science
"Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker."
Critique
"This is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life."
Conflict
"There can be no progress without head-on confrontation."
Change
"Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible."
Bible
"The point of protesting about 'moral equivalence' is surely not to blur moral choices on 'our side'. Is it?"
Morality
"In a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement."
History
"In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable."
Integrity
"Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation."
Philosophy
"Indeed, it's futile to try and use Holy Scripture to support any political position. I deeply distrust anyone who does. Just look at what an Islamic Republic is like."
Politics
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