quotations about cancer
You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.
SHERMAN ALEXIE
You Don't Have to Say You Love Me
If I keep grinning maybe my inoperable colon cancer won't hurt so much.
TONY MILLIONAIRE
Maakies
I would urge the government to allocate more funds toward fighting cancer. My own situation, it made me think. It made me think about the potential of dying. I wouldn't say I was scared. I'm more scared of how it will happen than of it happening. I'm not scared that I'm going to die. I think of how I'm going to die ... I don't want to linger. That scares me a little. The idea of lingering.
ARNOLD PALMER
Golf Digest, Jan. 2000
Acceptance of death and cancer did not mean I intended to give up, just the opposite. I was prepared to fight cancer not out of fear of dying, but out of joy of living.
EDIE LITTLEFIELD SUNDBY
The Mission Walker
Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.
NATALIE PALMER
Second Kiss
I vowed never to use words like "remission" or phrases like "beat cancer." Maybe it had to do with never wanting to let my guard down. In boxing, they say the punches most likely to knock you out are those you don't see coming. I never wanted to not see cancer coming again--I'd rather brace myself for the blow.
STUART SCOTT
Every Day I Fight
I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined ... imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness.
AUDRE LORDE
The Cancer Journals
I've had so many contacts from people who have survived cancer for 10 years, 12 years, 14 years. I am now a 30-day cancer survivor. I'm going to catch up to those other people. But they have been an inspiration to me, and that's really what it's all about.
ALEX TREBEK
interview, Good Morning America, May 1, 2019
Cancer though, it was a fickle friend that didn't care about your age, gender or race. It would move in take up residence and eventually kick you to the curb, it was a mean landlord and didn't care who it hurt in order to get what it wanted.
ELLA FRANK
Exquisite
In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.
SHERWIN B. NULAND
How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
EDWARD ABBEY
The Journey Home
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
She'd never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she'd had one handy.
JUNOT DIAZ
This Is How You Lose Her
I wish more and more that health were studied half as much as disease is. Why, with all the endowment of research against cancer is no study made of those who are free from cancer? Why not inquire what foods they eat, what habits of body and mind they cultivate? And why never study animals in health and natural surroundings? Why always sickened and in an environment of strangeness and artificiality?
SARAH N. CLEGHORN
Threescore
Ever since her diagnosis, she's been fading like a light bulb with cancer's hand on the rotary dimmer.
DANIELLE ESPLIN
Give It Back
Cancer, he'd said near the end, is the great equalizer. It doesn't care who you are or what kind of salary you make. It doesn't give one damn if you are a good person or a bad one. It is the ultimate villain because it's not capable of mercy. It only knows how to destroy.
KRISTINE WYLLYS
Losing Streak
Cancer is complicated, man. Every day, I'm on edge, waiting for the next shoe to drop. Any little pain, and I'm like, Oh my God, is that cancer? Has it spread? Is it growing? It's an every-day thing. That's why I seek out, and love, my moments of peace.
STUART SCOTT
Every Day I Fight
People wonder why cancer exists when it is just a clever method to teach people lessons about love and loss. It borrows time or steals it depending on the needs of Heaven. It is a vehicle to get us where we need to be. It calls us home because something needs us there.
KATE & JACK MCAFGHAN
Return from Rainbow Bridge
We "need" cancer because, by the very fact of its incurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer.
GILBERT ADAIR
"Under the Sign of Cancer", Myths and Memories