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"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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"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."
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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

"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

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

"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

"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."
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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."
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Personal Development

"MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive."
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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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"I felt very happy. To think that I didn't have to torture myself sitting in a smoke-filled room with a painted party smile, watching my date get drunk."
Freedom


"Slowly I swam up from the bottom of a black sleep."
Healing


"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call."
Humor


"Is there no way out of the mind?"
Philosophy


"I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives."
Humanity


"What a man is is an arrow into the future, and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from."
Gender


"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content."
Peace


"I don't know what I ate, but I felt immensely better after the first mouthful. It occurred to me that my vision of the fig-tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to the earth might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach."
Perception


"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."
Desire


"Talking about my fears to others feeds it."
Emotion
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