10 Quotes by Arthur W. Frank

Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.

The voices that speak to us at particular moments in our lives, especially during transitions or crises, imprint themselves with a force that later voices never quite displace.

It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.

The pedagogy of suffering means that one who suffers has something to teach, just as Gail claims, and thus has something to give, as Mairs recognizes.

Reflection on memory makes the self an object of wonder – an astonishment previously reserved for the contemplation of the world.

Broyard concludes that “it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.

The past is remembered with such arresting lucidity because it is not being experienced as past; the illness experiences that are being told are unassimilated fragments that refuse to become past, haunting the present.

Once the body has known death, it never lives the same again.

Nancy Mairs writes that calamities “have a genius of their own.