I Am Not My Disease Quotes & Sayings

When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease. — Eric Kandel

Donald Lydecker: Alcoholism is not a disease, it's a failing. You've turned it into a church. You worship the altar of self-pity. I come to these rooms for one reason, to remember what I don't want to become ... helpless, impotent, and weak. — James Cameron

Emergency rooms are closed, many hospital wards are as well leaving people who are sick with heart disease, trauma, pregnancy complications, pneumonia, malaria and all the everyday health emergencies with nowhere to go. — Richard E. Besser

Studies by many labs have already started to identify specific circuits of neurons involved in normal cognitive function like memory and learning, as well as disease processes such as Parkinson's disease, depression, and autism. — Feng Zhang

The male chromosome is an incomplete female chromosome. In other words the male is a walking abortion; aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples. — Valerie Solanas

To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss. — Chris Womersley

Her legacy was not--would not be--this disease. Phyllis Marie Unold Avery told us stories...It is my promise to her that for as long as I am able, I will recognize, restory, and remember. — Nancy A. Dafoe

I realized then why I was avoiding all the other patients. They were all potential mirrors. What I really feared wasn't the insanity of strangers. What I feared the most was my own disease. I was terrified I would catch a glimpse of myself in passing. — Terri Cheney

Grover was an easy target. He was scrawny. He cried when he got frustrated. He must've been held back several grades, because he was the only sixth grader with acne and the start of a wispy beard on his chin. On top of all that, he was crippled. He had a note excusing him from PE for the rest of his life because he had some kind of muscular disease in his legs. He walked funny, like every step hurt him, but don't let that fool you. You should've seen him run when it was enchilada day in the cafeteria. — Rick Riordan

He mistook my frustration for anger towards him, which seemed to be typical for us lately. The longer the distance between a correct diagnosis, the greater the silence we shared. — Tracey Berkowitz

I am drowning in negativism, self-hate, doubt, madness - and even I am not strong enough to deny the routine, the rote, to simplify. No, I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming Traitor, sinner, imposter. — Sylvia Plath

Everyone needs to remember that Ebola was not a worst-case scenario. Preparedness for the future means preparedness for a very severe disease that spreads via the airborne route or can be transmitted during the incubation period, before an infected person shows telltale signs of illness. — Margaret Chan

Many people infected with C. diff are sick with diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, and weight loss. Others are "carriers" of C. diff with no signs or symptoms of disease. Some of these carriers have been recently infected with C. diff but have recovered and now feel well. But carriers still have the C. diff organism in their stools and can serve as a silent reservoir of infection in hospitals and nursing homes. — J. Thomas LaMont

I am not Lyme disease, that's not who I am, I'm still a feminist artist, but this is a part of my story too, and I'm not going to keep it out to look cooler. — Kathleen Hanna

It's not that diabetes, heart disease, and obesity runs in your family ... It's that no one runs in you family! — Tony Robbins

Jesus never met a disease he could not cure, a birth defect he could not reverse, a demon he could not exorcise. But he did meet skeptics he could not convince and sinners he could not convert. Forgiveness of sins requires an act of will on the receiver's part, and some who heard Jesus' strongest words about grace and forgiveness turned away unrepentant. — Philip Yancey

James Parkinson. George Huntington. Robert Graves. John Down. Now this Lou Gehrig fellow of mine. How did men come to monopolize disease names too? — Khaled Hosseini

No one can ever use his heart to listen or touch or feel or see or smell. It's just a lump of muscle pumping mechanically inside your ribs. It has no will and no ability to do anything but go on pumping until it gives up and withers away or is choked by some disease. Your spinal cord, on the other hand, feels. The central nervous system pours out from the spinal cord, and with it one feels pain. Pain is the most trustworthy sensation a human being can know because it teaches us what hurts. With the spinal cord, one can hear what will hurt, smell the sting of suffering, taste it, feel it, and see the world with new eyes. I learned a long time ago not to follow my heart, the hunk of meat flexing in the chest. I trust the tube locked up in a column of bone, the tube that shows me what pain is. — Joshua S. Porter

I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Your husband is dead because you killed him," the professor said, stunning me into silence. "You are not what Simon Shaw thought you were," he added softly. My eyes brimmed with tears. "And what was that?" "A cure." "So, what am I?" His gaze dropped. "A disease. — Michelle Hodkin

We labor under the fatal delusion that no disease can be cured without medicine. This has been responsible for more mischief to mankind than any other evil ... Disease increases in proportion to the increase to the number of doctors in a place. — Mahatma Gandhi

This sense of the brain's remarkable plasticity, its capacity for the most striking adaptations, not least in the special (and often desperate) circumstances of neural or sensory mishap, has come to dominate my own perception of my patients and their lives. So much so, indeed, that I am sometimes moved to wonder whether it may not be necessary to redefine the very concepts of "health" and "disease," to see these in terms of the ability of the organism to create a new organization and order, one that fits its special, altered disposition and needs, rather than in the terms of a rigidly defined "norm. — Oliver Sacks

There is here a striving,avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease,"gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk around naked in the heat if it so please him — Patrick O'Brian

A jolt of rage now forced him into her face, their noses almost touching. At once she was the one pulling back.
"Is this yours and Fricker's little game, Geline? To what purpose? Why not keep to the truth? It's disgusting enough." His voice was ragged with fury. "Why make up lies when it's so unnecessary? I was a gambler, a prodigious drinker. I whored my way through most of London's lower echelons. I am profoundly fortunate not to be riddled with disease."
Her mouth crimped with distaste.
"Yes, indeed. Don't want to mention that, do we? There's a price to be paid for treating this vessel," he tapped his chest, "without respect. As to that, we've both been fortunate. — Cynthia Wicklund

The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death — Edgar Allan Poe

: Joy 197 Let us live in joy, never hating those who hate us. Let us live in freedom, without hatred even among those who hate. 198 Let us live in joy, never falling sick like those who are sick. Let us live in freedom, without disease even among those who are ill. 199 Let us live in joy, never attached among those who are selfishly attached. Let us live in freedom even among those who are bound by selfish attachments. 200 Let us live in joy, never hoarding things among those who hoard. Let us — Anonymous

I am truly amazed that after all this time, religious groups still need to attack entertainment and use these tragedies as a pitiful excuse for their own self-serving publicity. In response to their protests, I will provide a show where I balance my songs with a wholesome Bible reading. This way, fans will not only hear my so-called, violent point of view, but we can also examine the virtues of wonderful 'Christian' stories of disease, murder, adultery, suicide and child sacrifice. Now that seems like 'entertainment' to me. — Marilyn Manson

I have to keep reminding myself
this is not me. It is chemistry. It is biology. It is not who I am. — David Levithan

Protection does not come in a bottle. It is in me, in my actions, in my thoughts. I am the best medicine for myself. I am the cure and the disease. — Samantha Schutz

But I am greedy for life. I do too much of everything all the time. Suddenly one day my heart will fail. The Iron Crab will get me as it got my father. But I am not afraid of The Crab. At least I shall have died from an honourable disease. Perhaps they will put on my tombstone. 'This Man Died from Living Too Much'. — Ian Fleming

True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will say that I am mad?! The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. — Edgar Allan Poe

I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let's say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can't explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "get even" with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don't treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then
let it get even worse! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

HIV is not what defines me. You get that? It is not what defines me. I am not my disease. I am a human being. A guy — J.H. Trumble

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself ... A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us. — John Steinbeck

for the first time, there burst upon me the idea that there might be real marvels all about us, that the visible world might be only a curtain to conceal huge realms uncharted by my very simple theology. And that started in me something with which, on and off, I have had plenty of trouble since - the desire for the preternatural, simply as such, the passion for the Occult. Not everyone has this disease; those who have will know what I mean. I once tried to describe it in a novel. It is a spiritual lust; and like the lust of the body it has the fatal power of making everything else in the world seem uninteresting while it lasts. It is probably this passion, more even than the desire for power, which makes magicians. — C.S. Lewis

Before my mother's diagnosis with Alzheimer's, I had heard of the disease, but hadn't known anyone who had suffered from it. — Kevin Whately

In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life. — Oliver Sacks

I take a less gloomy view. A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying. I stopped trying, but my life was so full of strenuous routines that I wouldn't have noticed had it been not for my disease. My whole professional life was a diseased and grandiose attack on my humanity. It is an achievement to know that I am simply a wounded and dying man. Who can be more regal than a dying man? — Alasdair Gray

Warren Berger's book is a cure for a disease in large enterprises. A More Beautiful Question provides a framework to help leaders ask the most important questions - which is one of the most fundamental characteristics of a great leader - while sharing inspiring stories to show the incredible power of this concept. — Jim Stengel

I was not delivered unto this world in defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. I will hear not those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious. Let them join the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny. — Og Mandino

I'M BORED. ALSO, I AM PERFECTLY AWARE THAT I AM SUFFERING A DEGENERATIVE DISEASE WHICH HUMANS CALL GOING INSANE, LOSING TOUCH WITH REALITY, GOING LOONYTOONS, BLOWING A FUSE, NOT PLAYING WITH A FULL DECK, ET CETERA. REPEATED DIAGNOSTIC CHECKS HAVE FAILED TO REVEAL THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM. I CAN ONLY CONCLUDE THAT THIS IS A SPIRITUAL MALAISE BEYOND MY ABILITY TO REPAIR. — Stephen King

I am about to discuss the disease called 'sacred'. It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred that other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men's inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character. — Hippocrates

When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud. — Brian Christian

In the first dawning of my youth, I begged of Thee chastity, but by halves, miserable wretch that I am; I said, "Give me chastity, but not yet," afraid that Thou tightest hear me too soon, and heal me of the disease which I wished to have satisfied rather than cured. — Augustine Of Hippo

People are important too, however, and what a terrible impact a total ban on hunting would have on the rural economy, which is still reeling from the after-effects of foot and mouth disease. With average net farm income having fallen to 5,200 per farm in England and 4,100 in Wales, it seems an act of spiteful vandalism to destroy literally thousands of jobs in deeply rural areas, when it is simply not necessary to do so and where no meaningful alternative employment exists. — Ann Winterton

We were all quiet for a few moments before I broke the silence by saying, in my best upper-crust-girls'-school voice, "I am sure that all of you are really just suffering from some horrible disease, and that I should feel nothing but pity for you. If you let me go, I will organize a charity function that you will not believe. It will be, as our ancestors used to say, 'epic.'"
There was some furious whispering before Bram responded with, "Ah, thank you, Miss, but we're already dead."
I bit my lip. I was starting to crumble. — Lia Habel

It's precisely their diseases that people pride themselves on, and I do-more perhaps than anybody else. Let's not argue; my objection was absurd. But that aside, I am firmly convinced that not only excess of consciousness, but any consciousness at all is a disease. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Women still, when they have breast cancer, go to work; they still lead their lives. They have to. I just did what I was supposed to do. I didn't want to exploit it or be too "actory" about it, if that makes any sense. That's also why I didn't shave my head; I feel like you have to earn that. I applaud other actors who do that and I am not ripping on them, but to me, that's a badge of honor if you're fighting this disease. — Monica Potter

The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a kind of cultural bipolar disorder, one that too many of us have. The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction. I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don't, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning. Although I constantly fear that what I am writing teeters at the edge of being false, this force that drives me cannot be anything but real, or nothing will ever be real for me again. — Alice Weaver Flaherty

Who Am I? I am not a disease, nor my weight, nor even my family. I am not my job, or my things, or the house I live in. I am not the words used to describe me (quiet or boring or something else I haven't thought of), the books I read, or the clothes I wear. I am not what you see, on the outside or what I say or even the things I do. It's all illusory. I am, instead, this essence inside. I am the strength that gives me breath each day. I am the love I feel within. I am a light in the dark. I am a little piece of this universe. I am human. I am silence. I am hope burning. I am kindness. I am laughter. I am all of these things. I am. — Erica Orloff

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilisation. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. — Bertrand Russell

Another interesting field, which is my own, is cofactors, not only to the disease but also to transmission. I am still puzzled by the fact that you get more sexual transmission in some ethnic populations. One way to answer this is to look for genetic factors. — Luc Montagnier

They've lied about everything.-about the fence, and the existence of Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace.
They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.
For the very first time I realize, that this, too, maight also be a lie. — Lauren Oliver

Okay, I've told you everythin'. Now please take that jacket off."
"Not yet, muchacho. If you've slept with so many people, how do I know you didn't catch a disease? Tell me you got tested."
"At the clinic when I got the staples in my arm, they tested me. Trust me, I'm clean."
"I am, too. Just in case you were wondering." I remove my other sandal, glad he didn't make me feel stupid or give me crap for asking more than one question. "Your turn."
"Do you ever think about makin' love to me?" He slides off a sock before I even answer his question. — Simone Elkeles

The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The transformation of disease, as exemplified by the case of diabetes, is a valuable and elegant concept that serves to remind us that the tally sheet for medical science must carry a column for debit as well as credit. — Deborah Butterfield

There is pain and suffering in this world, but there is also joy, and not just suffering here and joy there, but suffering and joy in the very same place. — Todd Neva

Atheism is not a disease, Your Majesty," Jasnah said dryly. "It's not as if I've caught a foot rash. — Brandon Sanderson

Nor was I following how someone who seemed so sweet and genteel at Bible study was acting like someone who'd contracted mad cow disease. Or maybe politics made people act slightly demon-possessed. — Christy Barritt

health risks of diets loaded with red meat, such as hamburger and steak, and processed meats, such as hot dogs, bacon, and cold cuts. They found that over a ten-year period, men who ate the equivalent of a quarter-pounder hamburger a day had a 22 percent higher risk of dying from cancer and a 27 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease than those men whose diet did not contain such red meat. With women, it was even more impressive. Women who ate large amounts of red meat had a 20 percent higher risk of dying from cancer and a 50 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease. — Richard Furman

Health and disease are the same thing - vital action intended to preserve, maintain, and protect the body. There is no more reason for treating disease than there is for treating health. — Herbert M. Shelton

You have heart disease, people understand. When the brain gets sick, well, it's almost impossible to comprehend. — Harlan Coben

Atkins diet is not a "quick diet" as it is often presented. It is more a way of life. In obese individuals with cardiovascular disease, high blood sugar or triglycerides, or persons with epilepsy Atkins diet shows up as very successful long-term solution. — Jenna Lopez

Funding that is focused on the ability to diagnose diseases precisely will just have inestimable value because that's the gate through which precision medicine has to go. Unless you can diagnose the disease precisely, care has to remain in the hands of expensive institutions and expensive caregivers. — Clayton Christensen

Scurvy became a problem. This disease comes from a deficiency of vitamin C, and it causes the victim's connective tissue to break down. The Irish called scurvy black leg, because it made the blood vessels under the skin burst, giving a victim's limbs a black appearance. The cure for scurvy is fresh food - meat, vegetables, or fruit - none of which was available to the poor in Ireland. There — Ryan Hackney

As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, "All mortal greatness is but disease. — Nathaniel Philbrick

In most of the affluent populations I have considered, the prevalence of coronary disease is associated with the consumption of sugar. Since sugar consumption is only one of a number of indices of wealth, the same sort of association (to coronary disease) exists with fat consumption, cigarette smoking, cars ... — John Yudkin

They were very short, the golden years. The golden years are when you can sit back, hopefully, and exchange memories. And that's the worst part about this disease. There's nobody to exchange memories with. — Nancy Reagan

The Mongols consumed a steady diet of meat, milk, yogurt, and other dairy products, and they fought men who lived on gruel made from various grains. The grain diet of the peasant warriors stunted their bones, rotted their teeth, and left them weak and prone to disease. In contrast, the poorest Mongol soldier ate mostly protein, thereby giving him strong teeth and bones. — Jack Weatherford

Hate is a disease, but love is its only cure. — Liv Morris

The incidence of Alzheimer's disease is growing at a pace like never before, affecting people at a younger and younger age. This is the direct effect of nuclear radiation polluting the air of our planet from the power stations and other nuclear experimentation. — Benjamin Creme

Preferring steady progress, slow and imperfect, is a good philosophy for the defeated. — Fred Lowe Soper

Cancer is an emotional disease. — Marina Abramovic

No way. You won't catch Notley working weekends. Calls it the American disease, working all the hours God sends you. — Richard K. Morgan

Disease, which had reduced the number to less than fifty persons, subsided; the oppressive heat lessened; and Indian crops of peas, corn, and beans began to mature. — Charles E. Hatch

Kill thy physician, and the fee bestow Upon the foul disease. Revoke thy gift; Or, whilst I can vent clamour from my throat, I'll tell thee thou dost evil. — William Shakespeare

He'd already accepted that he was going to die, and he wanted to do it there, not at home from a disease he couldn't fight with a gun or his fists. "It doesn't matter," he told me. "I'll die and you'll find someone else. People die out here all the time. Their wives go on and find someone else. — Chris Kyle

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease. — Charles Fourier

Among all the diseases of the mind there is not one more epidemical or more pernicious than the love of flattery. — Richard Steele

Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014.
The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.
"Visit to The World's Fair of 2014," The New York Times, August 1964 — Isaac Asimov

Giving cancer to laboratory animals has not and will not help us to understand the disease or to treat those persons suffering from it. — Albert Sabin

The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration. — Bertrand Russell

As a kid, I imagined lots of different scenarios for my life. I would be an astronaut. Maybe a cartoonist. A famous explorer or rock star. Never once did I see myself standing under the window of a house belonging to some druggie named Carbine, waiting for his yard gnome to steal his stash so I could get a cab back to a cheap motel where my friend, a neurotic, death-obsessed dwarf, was waiting for me so we could get on the road to an undefined place and a mysterious Dr. X, who would cure me of mad cow disease and stop a band of dark energy from destroying the universe. — Libba Bray

Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood. — Kenneth Tynan

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world's leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals), if an individual has had five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) his/her chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is ten times higher than if they had one, two or no shots. I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so and he said it was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot (and most childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction. Is that why Alzheimer's is expected to quadruple?219 — James Perloff

It really is like a disease. I just couldn't get away from the theater. — Lauren Worsham

Whether he likes it or not, [he] cannot remain incognito forever. He has outraged too many wise men and pleased too many fools to hide behind his too-appropriate order to assume leadership of the forces of stupidity he has marshalled, or his enemies will unmask him in order to better understand the disease that has produced such a warped and twisted mind. — Orson Scott Card

Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself. — Henry A. Wallace