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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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"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
"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
"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
"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
"Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying."
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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."
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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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"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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"But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck."
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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."
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"I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing."
Love
"I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it."
Job
"I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write."
Time
"My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work."
Work
"EVERY DOG'S STORYI have a bed, my very own.It's just my size.And sometimes I like to sleep alonewith dreams inside my eyes.But sometimes dreams are dark and wild and creepyand I wake and am afraid, though I don't know why.But I'm no longer sleepyand too slowly the hours go by.So I climb on the bed where the light of the moonis shining on your faceand I know it will be morning soon.Everybody needs a safe place."
Security
"When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."
Life
"I simply do not distinguish between work and play."
Work
"Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together."
Poems
"Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response."
Sacrifice
"Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along."
Nature
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