668 Quotes About Illness

Sometimes with a flutter of agitated worry that felt like a beetle was trapped inside my ribs. p. 90

Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. ... Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? ... Time becomes even more elastic than usual--minutes can stretch for ages and days suddenly snap together. [p. 97]

Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which the readiness to love, however great, is banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been sufficiently exploited by comic writers.

Keats was getting a reputation just when he was too ill to appreciate it or build on it: his country was taking notice of him just when he would have to leave it.

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.

Here they go cruising for a fortnight up in parts where everyone is dead of radiation, and all that they can catch is measles!

Usually I take this opportunity to say something inspiring, about how my illness has changed me for the better and given me a clear purpose in life for both the work I do and the person I want to be. While all these things are true, the fact is that sometimes I'm in a physical state where I just don’t have it in me to be inspirational. And that’s all right – inspirational words are meaningless without the context of genuine human struggle.

there is a cultural perceptionthat we deserve thisbecause we overeator lack self-controland it isbullshit.diseases willaffect almost halfof all americans.it is no one’s fault

Meningitis, like the virus that caused it, wasn't a metaphor or a narrative device. It was just a disease.But we are hardwired to look for patterns, to make constellations from the stars. There must be some logic to the narrative, some reason for the misery.