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Illness Quotes
"I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself."
92
"My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness."
27
"The good thing about having this illness is that it allows me to be a little bit crazy."
24
"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."
23
"MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive."
23
"Serious illness doesn't bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host."
22
"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."
22
"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."
21
"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."
19
"I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while."
19
"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."
19
"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."
18
"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."
17
"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."
6
"There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in."
5
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