668 Quotes About Illness


  • Author Andrés Neuman
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    ..when questioned about their favorite techniques or their best loved authors, writers will talk incessantly, in the same way the sick become particularly garrulous when we inquire after their ailments; the difference being that writers can't help talking about something that saves them, whereas the sick can't help talking about the thing that is dragging them under.

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  • Author Meghan O'Rourke
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    So much of dealing with a disease is waiting. Waiting for appointments, for tests, for "procedures." And waiting, more broadly, for it--for the thing itself, for the other shoe to drop. Except in the waiting you keep forgetting that "it" will really happen--it's more like a threat, an anxiety: Will my love love me forever?

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  • Author Nikki Rowe
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    I became a mother before becoming sick, but i never expected sickness to take away my independent mothering, so i plant trees to sooth my soul from the aching pains of losing the maternal ability to mother another child. My first born will be my only treasure, the one who knew who i was before the mess entered our lives and also the one who adapted with me to a reality we weren't certain of oh and lots of plants and plants and plants.

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  • Author Marcel Proust
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    Nine tenths of the ills from which intelligent people suffer spring from their intellect. They need at least a doctor who understands the disease. How can you expect Cottard to be able to treat you? He has made allowances for the difficulty of digesting sauces, for gastric trouble, but he has made no allowance for the effect of reading Shakespeare.

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  • Author Paul Kalanithi
  • Quote

    I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

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