668 Quotes About Illness

Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten.

I've felt it for some time now, closing around me like the jaws of a gigantic flower. Isn't that a peculiar analogy? It feels that way, though. It has a certain vegetable inevitability. Think of the Venus flytrap. Think of kudzu choking a forest. It's a sort of juicy, green, thriving process. Toward, well, you know. The green silence. Isn't it funny that, even now, it's difficult to say the word 'death'?

Happy that the illness had left no trace on Dirmit, Atiye let her go outside that very day. But Atiye was wrong. The illness had marked her daughter in other ways. After the notch disease, Dirmit was left with certain traits that passed unnoticed. She kept everything she did as secred, and started to take pity on odd things.

Between the illness and the cure there is a strange realmPeopled by ignorant subjects who want and do not wantThe sword of sanity and the elmStake that scotches the vampire.- Life Story

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.

These workers," said Mendes with a gentle sweep of his arm, "have a hard life of it. When illness comes they have no money for a doctor. The food for tomorrow comes from today's labour, and hard labour it is, too. Their houses, as you see, are small and poor; they are never more than a stone's throw away from privation and want. They've made a bad bargain with life; they need the thought of God to comfort them.

I was stunned by the way my mother's body was being taken to pieces, how each new week brought a new failure, how surreal the disintegration of a body was.

You can't cure a person who's pretending to be sick.

One week later, he lies in the hospital room, his breath moving deliberately in and out of his body. He feels as if he has been in this small room forever, that his home life is a blurry dream he cannot really remember. He moves his feet in circles, first the left, then the right. Their swelling has not stopped., and he knows that soon he will be unable to move them at all.