Cancer Quotes

Sickness usually dominates the thoughts of a patient with cancer, but too much preoccupation with illness can have a destructive effect on the mind, and knowing what can happen frequently becomes self-fulfilling. Today, people who are ill will spend hours surfing the internet to find out all they can about their illness – but this isn’t always a good thing.

~ Jennifer Worth

He walked across the room and flicked a switch. A spotlight turned on, illuminating a laminated poster of a woman on his wall. He took a crayon from his pocket and began drawing on it. I could see smudges from past demonstrations. [. . .] His dashed lines crisscrossed the woman's chest as if he were planning a military maneuver on undulating terrain.

~ Kim Van Alkemade

According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.

~ Pierre Berton

Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.

~ Tom Brokaw

Maintaining the thinnest facade of a functioning family that tries to act as others do - plan ahead, drive somewhere, go on holiday, relax - is beyond us. We are smashed. Insecurity jams the gears on every action. Each time we are toppled. I feel a fool over and over again for trying.

~ Marion Coutts

These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.

~ Tom Brokaw

Is that cancer curable or just treatable.

~ Tom Brokaw

She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.

~ Lisa Genova

Love will cost you dearly.And it will break your heart.But in the end, it will save the world.

~ Sarah Thebarge

I don’t know how,” I confessed, and I pulled my hand away so I wouldn’t hurt her in my frustration.She grabbed my hand and brought it back, this time pressing it to her heart.“I’m telling you how. You hold onto me. You trust me. You use me. You lean on me. You rely on me. You let me shelter you. You let me love you. All of you. Cancer. Fear. Sickness. Health. Better. Worse. All of you. And you’ll have all of me.

~ Amy Harmon

Love and laughter are two of the most important universal cancer treatments on the planet. Overdose on them.

~ Tanya Masse

i’m super, it’s like my favourite meal and a birthday blowjob from Christina Hendricks in here.

~ David Louden

And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?

~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

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.

~ Mary Oliver

I want to be remembered as a kid who went down fighting, and didn't really lose

~ Zach Sobiech

An ounce of cancer prevention is worth a ton of cancer cure.

~ Robert A. Wascher

Everyday is a good day, even when things are hard because we are still here, still fighting to live among the latter.

~ Lisa Kinsella

Instead of a bucket list Someday Challenge™ wants you to create your Someday Slate™, a list of the things that you have promised yourself to do, things that you planned to do someday! Completing your Someday Slate™ will get you started on finally living your passion now.

~ David A. Koop

The cancer bubble. It's almost like he's not here. Like he's on pause, and my life with him is on pause, and we're just waiting to see if somebody is going to hit play again or just stop the thing entirely.

~ Abigail Barnette

Hormonal changes permanently alter the breast's structure. And when a pregnancy is terminated through abortion, the process is interrupted, which leaves cells in a sate of transition. And they say cells in this state have a very high risk of becoming cancerous. So the woman's chances of developing breast cancer later in life my be greatly increased.

~ Francine Rivers

Cancer is WAY too serious to be taken seriously all the time.

~ Tanya Masse

Just because someone has cancer, it doesn't mean you stop laughing at them or making fun of them.

~ Tanya Masse

Cancer is a bitch that needs to get the crap smacked out of it. I intend to stand on the front lines with a big-ass bat.

~ Brenna Aubrey

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.

~ John Green

What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? 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, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.

~ John Green

There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

~ John Green

I'm not one of those people who think that cancer is some kind of jousting match. People live or die based on good medicine, good luck, and the grace of God. The people that die from it did not fail. The people who live will die another day.

~ Paul Acampora

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.

~ Marion Coutts

Stay positive, stay strong, stay together and just keep going!

~ Tanya Masse

You are so high in the tree.If you jumpyou will live a full lifewhile falling.You will get marriedto a hummingbirdand raise beautiful part- hummingbirds. You will die of cancerin mid-air. I will not lie. It will be painful. You are a brave little boyor girl.

~ Zachary Schomburg

Almost all the world is natural chemicals, so it really makes you re-think everything. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. But we only found 22 that have been tested in animal cancer tests out of this thousand. And of those, 17 are carcinogens. There are ten milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee and thats more carcinogens than you're likely to get from pesticide residues for a year!

~ Bruce Ames

Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.

~ Rebecca Skloot

Bad news doesn't hurt as much, if you hear it in good company. It's like, if somebody pushes you out of a 5th floor window and you bounce off an awning, a car roof, and a pile of plastic garbage bags before you smash onto the pavement, you've got a pretty good chance of surviving.

~ Patricia Gaffney

Initially, after David’s diagnosis, I would cringe when I readbooks or articles by cancer survivors who stated that cancer hadbeen a gift in their lives. How could all that David endured beviewed as a gift? The invasive surgery, the weeks of chemotherapyand radiation: a gift?Yet, after the cancer, David would often reach for my hand andsay, “If it is cancer that is responsible for our new relationship, thenit was all worth it.” And I’d reluctantly agree that cancer had been agift in our lives. We’d both seen the other alternative: patients andsurvivors who had become bitter and angry, and neither one of uswanted to become that.

~ Mary Potter Kenyon

In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher

~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.

~ Gillian Flynn

Why can someoneget so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick?It’s like the world’s longest exorcism. It doesn’t make sense that I canchat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billionsof dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollarsto just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking fi gure outhow to cure cancer without torturing people.

~ Julie Halpern

When you walk this earth on borrowed time, each day on the calendar is a beloved friend you know for only a short time.

~ Judith Hooper

I am the sky and nothing can stick to me. The sky is open and vast and stays unchanged no matter what; it is always the sky. A storm can roll through it, an airplane can roar through, and it is always the sky.

~ Geralyn Lucas

Dear Whoever-that-just-found-out-that-they-have-a-terminal-illness, don't let that put you down. Technically, we are all dying.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana