158 Quotes About Chronic-illness

By staying, by shirking the responsibility and effort of leaving, by continuing to occupy this lovely man while giving him neither children nor a public companion nor a welcoming home-do I do wrong?

And all my ethical reasoning crumbles to ash in the sheer fact of his presence. Because together, even in darkness, we light up a room; because the clotted guilt inside me breaks up and disperses before a surge of stupid happiness; because I love him, and I know I cannot leave him, am incapable of leaving him, unless he asks me to go. And he has not asked me. And that is the miracle which I live with, every day.

This business of dying wasn't as simple as surrender to the great light. It was real and dirty and untidy.

I hope in the next world I shall be at ease, but in this I find I must not expect it long together.

She resented her body's betrayal. She still couldn't express how insecure it made her, how she lived on a precipice. The most basic parts of her could fail, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Futility. Uselessness. Bloody entrophy. Death matters, at least sometimes.

Physically, mentally, emotionally -- it seems like every part of me is broken in one way or another.

Often the pain that makes us feel most stuck is not our suffering; it is experiencing distress in the presence of people who expect us to get better faster than we can.

Living with long-term suffering in American culture feels like being off-key. Suffering quiets and slows, but our culture prefers a crescendo.