Cancer Scars Quotes & Sayings

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old. — A.P.

I used the physical scar of my breast cancer operation, the scar that I have across my chest as a metaphor for all kinds of scars. — Carly Simon

The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords. But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert. — Ernest Hemingway,

I will not be defined by the marks left on me by the world, but by the mark I leave on the world (referring to the facial scars he still carries from his successful 1991 battle against cancer, which caused him to be turned down for a customer service job because he was "too ugly"). — James Houston Turner