668 Quotes About Illness

It isn't discomfort, or dis-ease as he put it. It's this aching, throbbing, god-awful incurable pain - and it's known as life. When will the doctors learn: It isn't death that's the disease.

Vivre est une maladie, dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les seize heures ; c’est un palliatif : la mort est le remède.

He did not like illness, he distrusted it, as he distrusted the road without signposts.("Death Of A Traveling Salesman")

I don't deserve either her love or this illness. That's a stupid thing though. Things happen whether you deserve them or not.

Their marriage hadn’t died dramatically. There were no adulterous truants or burst spleens or freakish lightning strikes or splattered brains over the highway. Their marriage had died of neglect and errors and abrasiveness. It died under a long protracted illness for which there was a diagnosis but no remedy. The disease had no name. So how could she explain it to others?

I have traversed many kinds of health, and keep traversing them... and as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit.

Nothing worked. This blazing pain seemed only to be getting worse.

Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, it its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself.

Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients who are instructed that they have, unwittingly, caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it.