Cancer Quotes

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.

~ Christopher Lasch

The failure to accept cancer as a systemic disease is one of the greatest failures in modern medicine.

~ Michael Lam

He was one of the few people who had spoken to me as though his words were not rocks and I was not glass.

~ Meredith Norton

Please don’t preach at me—I feel bad enough already.

~ Shirley Corder

When life is going according to plan, we don't stop to question our daily habits...Maybe it's time to sift through our lives.

~ Shirley Corder

There's only one way to become an eagle, and that's to be born an eagle.

~ Shirley Corder

In God's strength I could battle the giants. Alone, I was just a grasshopper.S

~ Shirley Corder

Many patients with cancer are depressed, yet depression is not the cause of cancer.

~ David S. Bell

Cancer doesn’t give a shit how much you want to live. If it wants to kill you, it will.

~ A.s. King

You die in the middle of your life.

~ John Green

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

When one person gets cancer, the whole family gets cancer.

~ Shirley Corder

No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.“It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

Life is too precious to waste any of it regretting the past.

~ Gordon Savage

In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and — no time to think — out you go.You descend. You hit the ground....But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to?...No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't?The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making.

~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Because really, what do you have to lose? Your life? That's no big deal, I promise you. When you find out you might die, you're finally allowed to live like you never have before. If you lose your life while living the shit out of it, then you've done the best you could, and you shouldn't worry about death. When you're dead, you can't screw up. But while you're here, all you have are a few things to call your own. You have your integrity, your family, and your hope for the future. These are important and you should keep them somewhere safe where you'll remember them.

~ Kevin Lankes

I've learned so much during my time with cancer. It's taught me a lot about who I am. It revealed to me my true goals and priorities. It introduced me to a brand new world where time isn't wasted, and important things aren't left unsaid. All the while, the superfluities of life are ignored and forgotten. Because I now understand how a person should act, whether confronted by death or not. And it's a shame that's what it takes to scare someone into becoming a conducive, meritable human being.

~ Kevin Lankes

We can look at our tattoos from cancer treatment as awful reminders of a ghastly time in our lives, or we can use them as reminders of what God brought us through.

~ Shirley Corder

Nothing takes God by surprise, not even cancer.

~ Shirley Corder

The pain he feels in his own gut is either something to do with the caffeine, or the stress of realizing that if it's not snipers or blindness stealing your children, it's cancer coming to snipe your wife, and there's not a fucking thing a guy can do about any of it except to drop to his knees and pray, to pretend like someone or something that gives a shit is on teh other end of the line, to pretend anything, like you did when you were a kid until the pretending seems real, because without that all you've got for comfort is what's in front of your face...

~ Scott Wrobel

The devil sought to destroy me and discredit my testimony. But God wanted me where I would testify to others about his saving power.

~ Shirley Corder

Cancer may have blindsided you, but it didn't blindside God.~ Strength Renewed

~ Shirley Corder

The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.

~ Dan Simmons

Cancer is finite. God is way bigger.

~ Shirley Corder

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

~ John Green

Yes?’ he asked, looking at me over the sheet.‘I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.’‘Oh, a writer, eh?’‘Yes.’‘Are you sure?’‘No, I’m not.’‘What do you write?’‘Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.’‘A novel, eh?’‘Yes.’‘What’s the name of it?’‘”The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.”‘‘Oh, I like that. What’s it about?’‘Everything.’‘Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?’‘Yes.’‘How about my wife?’‘She’s in there too.

~ Charles Bukowski

But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.

~ John Green

Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.

~ John Green

The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer

~ Dan Simmons

But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.

~ John Green

And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.

~ Chuck Klosterman

God had not abandoned us. He was actively working behind the scenes, when I had no means or spirit to fight.

~ K. Howard Joslin

God dramatically slew one monstrous opponent and then threw us into the arena against a stronger and more vicious foe.

~ K. Howard Joslin

She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant

~ Peter Carey

For whatever time I have to live, I intend to enjoy myself. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live.

~ Rachele Baker

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live

~ Rachele Baker

Each appointment brought fear, uncertainty and discouragement. Ann’s constant concern was, What if I have cancer?

~ K. Howard Joslin

I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.

~ John Green

If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

~ John Green

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.

~ John Green