People With Cancer Quotes & Sayings

Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern. Just the slow erosion of the self, as insidious as any cancer. And, like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience. A room in hell with only your name on the door. — Martha Manning

Much like the removal of moles and skin lesions is done to prevent them from growing into more serious skin abnormalities, removing minor discord before it becomes a calamity is an important use of our time. Most people don't like to make waves and they swallow frustration and bury true feelings, not wanting to compromise temporary tranquility, never realizing that massive turmoil doesn't start out massive - it grows beneath the skin like a cancer that could have been avoided with early detection. — T.D. Jakes

But when I first got cancer, after the initial shock and the fear and paranoia and crying and all that goes with cancer - that word means to most people ultimate death - I decided to see what I could do to take that negative and use it in a positive way. — Herbie Mann

A lot of people are listening and most people believe global warming is a problem and they'd like to see it addressed. But governments and the biggest companies in the world don't want to deal with it like they didn't want to deal with the fact that tobacco causes cancer. — John H Richardson

But today in the United States, and this shows you where fascism REALLY exists, Any doctor in the United States who cures cancer using alternative methods will be destroyed. You cannot name me a doctor doing well with cancer using alternative therapies that is not under attack. And I know these people; I've interviewed them. — Gary Null

I am a 36-year-old person with breast cancer, and not many people know that that happens to women my age or women in their 20s. This is my opportunity now to go out and fight as hard as I can for early detection. — Christina Applegate

Dr Dean Burk, who has spent more than fifty years in cancer research, mainly at the National Cancer Institute states: 'More people have died in the last thirty years from cancer connected with fluoridation than all the military deaths in the entire history of the United States.' — Dean Burk

This enzyme, called telomerase, slows the rate at which telomeres degrade, and research indicates that healthy people with longer telomeres have less risk of developing the common illnesses of aging - like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, which are three big killers today. — Elizabeth Blackburn

If you could read some of the stories that we had before us of parents of children dying of, let's say, bone cancer. Or people who dealt with family members drowning in their own bodies, in the end, suffering without any hope of modern medical science easing their pain or offering any comfort. With the absolute knowledge that they were going to die anyway. I can't quite comprehend how we could want those people to continue to suffer that extreme agony on the understanding that it is the will of a creator or some other philosophical concept. — Kelvin Ogilvie

At your next dinner party, try playing the following game. Challenge everyone around the table to produce a single drug that can cure people of an illness, other then antibiotics. If you come up with anything, stop whatever you are doing and call me. — Lynne McTaggart

People grow; people grow apart, and cancer ... I've had a very in-depth and personal experience with cancer, and it really causes a perspective shift. — Justin Baldoni

People are used to dealing with risk. You are told if you smoke, you are at higher risk of lung cancer. And I think people are able to also understand, when they are told they are a carrier for a genetic disease, that is not a risk to them personally but something that they could pass on to children. — Anne Wojcicki

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that's one in five ... so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards. — John Green

I think a lot of people just aren't aware how young you can be and be diagnosed with breast cancer. — Kate Walsh

I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn't see any way to change things.
Only end them. — Chuck Palahniuk

Things people say to depressives that they don't say in other life-threatening situations:

'Come on, I know you've got tuberculosis, but it could be worse. At least no one's died.'
'Why do you think you got cancer of the stomach?'
'Yes, I know, colon cancer is hard, but you want to try living with someone who has got it. Sheesh. Nightmare.'
'Oh, Alzheimer's you say? Oh, tell me about it, I get that all the time.'
'Ah, meningitis. Come on, mind over matter.'
'Yes, yes, your leg is on fire, but talking about it all the time isn't going to help things, is it?'
'Okay. Yes. Yes. Maybe your parachute has failed. But chin up. — Matt Haig

I know inside that there is more to life than this mortal coil. It's a very shallow minded person who thinks that someone is born and dies and that's it. I haven't gone through thirty odd years of suffering, and doing what I do, and looking at other people who are born and die with cancer, with AIDS, with whatever, and think, 'well, what was the point of that?'. There is a point to everything, and we're here to learn, and it's just a learning curve and we'll move on, and this is just a shell. It's just I've got a dodgy shell. — Jonny Kennedy

Still i knew because of my own feelings there was something wrong with me and i knew it wasnt only me. I knew it was everybody. It was like a bacteria or a cancer or a trance. It wasnt on the skin, it was in the soul. It showed itself in lonliness, lust, anger , jealousy and depression. It had people screwed up bad everywhere you went- at the store, at home, at church, it was ugly and deep. Lots of singers on the radio were singing about it and cops had jobs because of it. It was as if we were broken I thought, as if we were never supposed to feel these sticky emotions. It was as if we were cracked, coudlnt love right, couldnt feel good things for a long before screwing it all up.
I am talking about the broken quality of life. — Donald Miller

The most compassionate and peaceful thing you can do for yourself and others is to let go of the past, let go of the anger, let go of trying to hurt people that wronged you. There are thousands of people dying from cancer that wish they had someone to care about them and be with them during their final days. There are children being sold into sex trafficking and are hoping someone would rescue them. There are homeless people that wish they had something warm to wear or eat. There is an entire species being wiped out because not enough people care about our oceans. Today, remember that there is someone praying for the very things you take for granted. Spend your effort where God needs you to be
on the front lines of the war on earth, not on the battlefields of the past. — Shannon L. Alder

For many years now I have listened to the stories of people with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses as their counselor. From them I have learned how to enjoy the minute particulars of life once again, the grace of a hot cup of coffee, the presence of a friend, the blessing of having a new cake of soap or an hour without pain. Such humble experience is the stuff that many of the very best stories are made of. If we think we have no stories it is because we have not paid enough attention to our lives. Most of us live lives that are far richer and more meaningful than we appreciate. — Rachel Naomi Remen

In my small, coastal New England town, an hour outside New York, I know many people who have dealt with cancer. I can reel off the names of at least 15 women I know, all in their 40s. — Jane Green

The ban doesn't have anything to do with Livestrong or my ability to work in [the cancer] community. Perhaps it speeds it up. I don't know the examples in Great Britain of athletes who have fallen. I know the examples in the United States - the Tiger Woods, the Michael Vicks, even the Bill Clintons - people who are still out there able to work. — Lance Armstrong

I'm forever hopeful," he said. "That's what friends do. They hope. They have faith in each other."

"Well, I have faith that she'll forget," I said, hiking my backpack up onto my shoulders. "You have to be a realist with Caro."

"I'm a hopeful realist," Drew said. "I'm a healist! Like those guys on TV late at night that cure people of cancer." He grinned down at me. — Robin Benway

If you want to live long, sleep more and eat less ... Intermittent fasting was associated with more than a 40 percent reduction in heart disease risk in a study of 448 people published in the American Journal of Cardiology reporting that 'most diseases, including cancer, diabetes and even neurodegenerative illnesses, are forstalled' by caloric reduction. — Christopher Ryan

People don't get cancer or diabetes or have a baby with Down syndrome as any kind of punishment. People who believe that are very 'limited', which is polite way to say they're stupid. — Nancy Freund

You see, team," Dan said passionately, "our problem is negativity, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. I believe where there is a void, negativity will fill it. And, unfortunately, within every organization you get voids in communication between leaders and their employees and between different teams and team members. It happens everywhere: with sports teams, work teams, family teams. Within these voids, negativity starts to breed and grow and, eventually, like a cancer it will spread if you don't address it. As an executive team it's up to us to do everything we can to prevent these voids from occurring and when they do occur, we must quickly fill them with positive communication and positive energy. People don't just want to be seen and heard. They want to hear and see, and if they don't feel like they are part of the company then they will assume the worst and act accordingly. — Jon Gordon

ALS is, in my opinion, the cruelest disease. At least with cancer, there's a glimmer of hope. You can come up with a game plan and you can fight. ALS is terminal. In all cases. Nobody has ever beaten ALS. I don't say this to be callous or melodramatic; indeed, I saw its effects up close. Worst of all, it affects only the body, so as people become progressively and inevitably more paralyzed, they are keenly aware of everything that is happening to them. Think about that: You are 100 percent aware of your own paralysis. The — Bryan Bishop

The words of young Ted Kennedy, Jr., who lost his leg to cancer. "People are taught we should look perfect," he said. "I wondered who would ever go out with a kid with one leg. — Erma Bombeck

Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutzdity, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because huma beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers. — Leopold Kohr

Why can someone
get so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick?
It's like the world's longest exorcism. It doesn't make sense that I can
chat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billions
of dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollars
to just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking fi gure out
how to cure cancer without torturing people. — Julie Halpern

I suspect that the vast majority of people, not knowing in advance whether they will either end up in a permanently vegetative state or be diagnosed with cancer, would prefer that any resources that would be spent on PVS care be reallocated to cancer research
or some similar enterprise that has the potential to help human beings who might actually recover. — Jacob M. Appel

I don't know of many people who've done sex research with an eye toward people saying sex is bad for you, except for the promiscuity and cervical cancer link - which is actually a valid discovery. — Mary Roach

If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people. — Kay Redfield Jamison

You can at least let sick people have marijuana because it's helpful. But the compassionate conservatives say, well we can't do this, we're going to put people who are sick and dying with cancer and are being helped with marijuana if they have multiple sclerosis - the federal government is going in there and overriding state laws and putting people like that in prison. — Ron Paul

Mr Freeman: "Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag." He sticks his finger down his throat. "The next time you work on your trees, don't think about trees. Think about love, or hate, or joy, or pain- whatever makes you feel something, makes your palms sweat, or your toes curl. Focus on that feeling.
When people don't express themselves, they die on piece at a time. You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside- walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know. — Laurie Halse Anderson

I guess most of us would rather not discuss cancer because we are all afraid we might be told we have it. It's hard for people to even say the word, and that's the first obstacle you have to overcome when you are diagnosed with the disease. I think once you understand a little more about it ... I don't mean it gets any easier ... but I think you give it more in-depth thought about how you're going to deal with it. — Arnold Palmer

Delay, says Dr. Manner, is a luxury which people with right-now cancers cannot afford. — Paul Harvey

Poppy Devine did not deserve cancer. Poppy was sweet and industrious and careful and measured and always, always did the right thing. If anyone deserved cancer it was Julia. Julia was loud and opinionated and disagreeable. Rude, some might even say. She went out with bad men, took unnecessary risks, pushed people to their limits, swore like a sailor and flipped the bird more than any female in the history of the world.
It should be her number coming up in the cancer lottery. — Amy Andrews

More people have died in the name of religion than have ever died of cancer. And we try to cure cancer ... What makes us take up arms against those who pray to the same God with different words? — Chuck Austen

One of the pitfalls of writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise, beyond-their-years creatures or else these sad-eyed, tragic people. And the truth is people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. — John Green

But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People with cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera. — John Green

Suggesting I hate people with religion because I hate religion is like suggesting I hate people with cancer because I hate cancer. — Ricky Gervais

Regarding his friend's insight after losing her spouse to cancer: "She told me she had plenty of people to do things with but nobody to do nothing with. — Peter Bach

Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn't surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.9 When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive.10 Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women's life expectancy post surgery.11 In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.12 — Shawn Achor

With the loss of acute illnesses we have seen a loss of human potential and a dramatic increase in chronic 'incurable' diseases. If we want to return to health, we have to look at disease in a way that is different from the accepted medical models, because these models do not work. There has been no overall improvement in the mortality rates for most forms of cancer in the past 100 years, yet still people put their faith in drugs, surgery and radiation. Terminal patients are often offered 'new drugs' in the hope of prolonging life but are in fact being treated as little more than guinea pigs. All disease is curable, but the cure can only be found within the body. — Barbara Wren

If you have friends, relatives and other people whom you know who are struggling with terminal, chronic or rare illnesses, refer them to the Stellah Mupanduki Healing Books and they will be saved. You can also read to your grandparents/parents with diseases like, cancer, Alzheimer's, MS, Parkinson And Coma...you can also read these to children and you can also read these good reads for your own salvation. there is a wide selection for everything you need for true healing from this author's books. — Stellah Mupanduki

You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art. Philip — W. Somerset Maugham

Still, for the moment he was keeping quiet about his interest in cancer. "You have to realize, cancer was a devastating disease," said Druker. "Everybody died." The disease was a grim, dark domain where only the most morbid physician dared tread, and Druker was unwilling to admit, even to himself, that he was fascinated by it. "Everybody was afraid of it, and people in oncology [were] weird because this disease was so hopeless," he recalled. "Why would you go take care of patients with no hope? You were crazy if you were going to do that. — Jessica Wapner

We have made some great strides in terms of treating various types of cancer with early detection. The success rate of recovery for many people today is better than it was a decade or two ago so we can't give up. Yes, we would all love a quick "cure all" but that is not reality. Until then, we all are in this together and we have to keep working towards more progress! — Eva LaRue

When cancer first came into my life, people all around me treated it as the enemy. I was told I had to join the medical team and we'd fight together to defeat it. This was the wrong thing to say to someone who was the last one to be picked for any team. I was much happier sitting on the sidelines and encouraging the other players. I was totally unskilled at defeating anything. So I secretly went my own way and decided that I was free to choose the meaning of the healing experience. I decided I would develop a friendly relationship with the cancer, which was something I was good at. — Dawna Markova

Better treatment and detection methods have also improved the survival rate for people with cancer, and for the first time in history, this year the absolute number of cancer deaths in the U.S. has decreased. — Ike Skelton

People saw me as being heroic, but I was no more heroic than I was with other injuries I had, like the lacerated kidney I suffered during the 1990 World Series. It's just that people haven't known anyone with a lacerated kidney, but everyone can relate to someone with cancer. — Eric Davis

I've gotten to the point where I'm not even a little apologetic about this business of not eating stuff that's bad for me. No one else has to live with my fat, work through my energy and mood swings, pay my doctor bills, fight my cravings, for face my family history of diabetes and cancer. If people insist, I can get a little testy. — Dana Carpender

Why Hollywood has killed so many movie stars with cigarette smoking, with the romanticization of it from John Wayne to Humphrey Bogart, all those people had cancer, died of it, and sold cigarettes their whole career. — Chris Hayes

Psychiatry, as a subspecialty of medicine, aspires to define mental illness as precisely as, let's say, cancer of the pancreas, or streptococcal infection of the lungs. However, given the complexity of mind, brain, and human attachment systems, we have not come even close to achieving that sort of precision. Understanding what is "wrong" with people currently is more a question of the mind-set of the practitioner (and of what insurance companies will pay for) than of verifiable, objective facts. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

A science can diagnose a cancer and can even find a cure for it, but it can't, and a scientist will be the first to say, it's can't help you to deal with the stress and disappointment and terror that comes with a diagnosis, and nor can it help you to die well, like Socrates, kindly, not railing against faith, but in possession of your own death. For these imponderable questions people have turned to mythos. — Karen Armstrong

People love to be listened to and represented, and they love it when they feel like you have some of the same problems that they do. Everybody deals with things like romantic difficulties in relationships and death and cancer and abuse. — Jason Isbell

Too many people are overly respectful, braying, 'You're so brave' and Irv fell smack into that trap. After all what's so courageous about having cancer? Once we have it, what choice do we have? But the worst thing of all - and thank God Irv doesn't do this, at least not yet - is all this nonsensical talk about a patient's courageous struggle with cancer that all too often ends in defeat. How many obituaries do you see stating that so-and-so lost their courageous battle with cancer? I hate that! I absolutely hate it! If someone put that in my obituary, I'd come back and kill him! — Irvin D. Yalom

I understand that for the people who really care about you the fact that you are facing cancer is very hard to swallow. They will need time managing and dealing with their emotions just as you do. — Yilda B. Rivera

People's view of cancer will change when they have their own relationship with cancer, which everyone will, at some point. — Laura Linney

A cigarette is a roll of paper, tobacco, and drugs, with a small fire on one end and a large fool at the other. Some of its chief benefits are cancer of the lips and stomach, softening of the brain, funeral procesions, and families shrouded in gloom and grief. Although a great many people know this, they still smoke in order to appear sophisticated. — Ann Landers

Mystery has great power. In the many years I have worked with people with cancer, I have seen Mystery comfort people when nothing else can comfort them and offer hope when nothing else offers hope. I have seen Mystery heal fear that is otherwise unhealable. For years I have watched people in their confrontation with the unknown recover awe, wonder, joy, and aliveness. They have remembered that life is holy, and they have reminded me as well. In losing our sense of Mystery, we have become a nation of burned-out people. People who wonder do not burn out. — Rachel Naomi Remen

But when this happens to you - and I think other people would identify with this - suddenly, colors are brighter. You see everything. — Lynn Redgrave

You are still young and stupid. Human life has no value. Haven't you learned that yet, Takeshi, with all you've seen? It has no value, intrinsic to itself. Machines cost money to build. Raw materials cost money to extract. But people?" She made a tiny spitting sound. "You can always get some more people. they reproduce like cancer cells, whether you want them or not. They are abundant, Takeshi. Why should they be valuable? Do you know that it costs us less to recruit and use up a real snuff whore than it does to set up and run the virtual equivalent format. Real human flesh is cheaper than a machine. It's the axiomatic truth of our times. — Richard K. Morgan

It's like they say about soldiers coming back from war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week's chemotherapy and you're in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week's up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything's normal and familiar. It's too much. You think - one world can't possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you're going to go crazy when you realise the world is that big and it can fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to. — Steven Hall

One third of all of our cancers are from tobacco. It's one of the big killers in America and more than half of our kids still have environmental tobacco smoke exposure when environmental tobacco smoke is known to be associated with sudden infant death syndrome, with ear infections, respiratory infections and the rest. If we had to pick something to really go after, that would be one that I would really argue is an extraordinarily high priority and something people can actually do something about. — Richard Jackson

My goal is people associate November with COPD awareness month as much as they notice October with breast cancer and pink. That'd be a great thing if it happened. The fact that COPD kills more people than breast cancer and diabetes put together should raise some red flags. — Danica Patrick

Clean water is a necessity that we can no longer take for granted. Each year more people die of water related diseases than any other cause of death on this planet. With a higher rate of suffering and mortality than diabetes, cancer, high cholesterol, or war; or any two combined for that matter! An entire economy is growing around water. Those without money are suffering the most and risk severe illness from contaminated sources — Jewel

Industrialized countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry (after adjusting for age and population size). One half of all the world's cancers occur in people living in industrialized countries, even though we are only one-fifth of the world's population. Closely tracking industrialization are breast cancer rates, which are highest in North America and northern Europe, intermediate in southern Europe and Latin America, and lowest in Asia and Africa. — Sandra Steingraber

My biggest fear in life is losing the people I love, and the thing with cancer is that it seems that you can't really control it. — Mollie King

When we feel like giving up, like we are beyond help, we must remember that we are never beyond hope. Holding on to hope has always motivated me to keep trying. I have found this hope by connecting with others. I've found it not only in individuals who have dealt with eating disorders but also in people who have battled addictions and those who have survived abuse, cancer, and broken hearts. I have found much-needed hope in my passions and dreams for the future. I've found it in prayer. Real hope combined with real actions has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through. In other words, sitting around and simply hoping that things will change won't pick you up after a fall. Hope only gives you strength when you use it as a tool to move forward. Taking real action with a hopeful mind will pull you off the ground that eighth time and beyond. — Jenni Schaefer

One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else. — John Green

I've been talking to people, and I've gone to hospitals, talked to survivors, to doctors, to caregivers. I just learned that there's really no one way for somebody to experience dealing with cancer. — Italia Ricci

Most of the human body disease such as Obesity, Cancer, Heart disease are linked with our food which we eat in our day to day life. If people are eating health food than how come there be more than 50% death from heart and cancer disease alone in a developed nation such as USA? — Subodh Gupta

My mother told me, 'Son, nobody else but God knows.' And that's what I'm about - reaching out to the people, crying with them, giving them hope. Visiting the hospital, visiting the kids with cancer, visiting the adults, and stuff like that. That's what I do. — Mr. T

My family and friends were definitely the key to my recovery. One thing that I do suggest is that anyone dealing with a life-threatening illness like cancer choose a point person for people to call to find out how you are doing - a sister, brother, mother, father, daughter, son, or close friend. — Olivia Newton-John

Here was the plot: A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing. Zog landed at night in Connecticut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golfclub. — Kurt Vonnegut

I just find it crazy what people will critique you on, and you have to take it with a grain of salt. I could be curing cancer, and I would be shunned for it. I mean, that's just the truth. People are crazy, but I like to say for every hater I have 100 people that love me and they think it's motivational, so I try to focus on that. But it's sometimes hard, you know? — Khloe Kardashian

Because there is no challenge, there is no reason to work hard. And with no reason to work hard, we all have become lazy. Lazy people are like cancer. They spread. Before you know it, the entire country is destroyed. — Tahir Shah

There was a Dana Phelps with a son named Brandon, but they didn't live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Phelpses resided in a rather tony section of Greenwich, Connecticut. Brandon's father had been a big-time hedge fund manager. Beaucoup bucks. He died when he was forty-one. The obituary gave no cause of death. Kat looked for a charity - people often requested donations made to a heart disease or cancer or whatever cause - but there was nothing listed. — Harlan Coben

I'll also tell you that five hundred thousand people will die this year of cancer. And I'll also tell you that one in every four will be afflicted with this disease, and yet, somehow, we seem to have put it in a little bit of the background. — Jim Valvano

We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin' Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been. — Anthony Marra

Nora Lindell was gone. And, with Trey Stephens in jail, he was gone, too, in a way. By this time, we'd already lost Minka Dinnerman, as well (a car crash and cancer, respectively). It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who'd left us behind. — Hannah Pittard

Two-thirds of the terminal cancer patients in the Coping with Cancer study reported having had no discussion with their doctors about their goals for end-of-life care, despite being, on average, just four months from death. But the third who did have discussions were far less likely to undergo cardiopulmonary resuscitation or be put on a ventilator or end up in an intensive care unit. Most of them enrolled in hospice. They suffered less, were physically more capable, and were better able, for a longer period, to interact with others. In addition, six months after these patients died, their family members were markedly less likely to experience persistent major depression. In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. — Atul Gawande

I'd like to prove to other people that it's not the end of everything to be diagnosed with cancer. — Christopher Hitchens

Faye keeps forgetting what she'll be giving up if she decides to stay here. Access to modern medicine, for starters. In 2015 people can survive cancer, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. Vaccines eradicated polio and measles. Do you really want to live in a world with iron lungs and polio, Faye? Do you?" "I guess I could go back to 2015 and live in a world with meth, heroin, terrorism, HIV and Ebola. Huge improvement, right? — Tiffany Reisz

Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. ... — Siddhartha Mukherjee

CELL

Now look objectively. You have to
admit the cancer cell is beautiful.
If it were a flower, you'd say, How pretty,
with its mauve centre and pink petals

of if a cover for a pulpy thirties
sci-fi magazine. How striking:
as an alien, a success,
all purple eye and jelly tentacles
and spines, or are they gills,
creeping around on granular Martian
dirt red as the inside of the body,

while its tender walls
expand and burst, its spores
scatter elsewhere, take root, like money,
drifting like a fiction or
miasma in and out of people's
brains, digging themselves
industriously in. The lab technician

says, It has forgotten
how to die. But why remember? All it wants is more
amnesia. More life, and more abundantly. to take
more. to eat more. To replicate itself. To keep on
doing those things forever. Such desires
are not unknown. Look in the mirror. — Margaret Atwood

When we truly fear God, our fear of other things and other people begins to wane. Big fears make little fears go away. We can spend our days worrying about a host of daily challenges, but let the word cancer be mentioned in the same sentence with our name, and all our daily anxieties disappear into the cloud of a bigger fear. God, of course, is not a malevolent force like cancer. This means that when our smaller fears are absorbed by fear of Him, our lives gain security rather than become debilitated by the terror of an uncertain future. — David Jeremiah

Would it have killed her to play along? To have told Pauline, Oh my! You're kidding! What a scandal! If gossip gave Pauline pleasure why deny her? Surely there was little enough pleasure for Pauline outside of work. A mother she'd nursed through cancer, a brother she was estranged from because of a terrible wife, a small apartment and a cheap landlord and an unending series of contacts with people - a grocer, a butcher, a waitress, a salesclerk, a bus driver - who did not meet her expectations. — Alice McDermott

FYI, car crashes kill way more kids than cancer does. Those crosses you see on the side of the highway, the little white ones hung with fading silk flowers? They're for people my age. ("People who were texting," my dad liked to remind me - because he never wanted to blame Budweiser for anything.) — James Patterson

Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punch line: 'It's easy to be healthy - smoke one less cigarette a month.' We know without a moment's reflection that this campaign would fail," wrote British climate activist and author George Marshall. "The target is so ludicrous, and the disconnection between the images and the message is so great, that most smokers would just laugh it off. — Naomi Klein

Just when I think you've hit bottom you continue to amaze me," Kyle said. "Or, does this get worse? Nothing would surprise me after this. Are you sleeping with a married man whose wife is dying of cancer?"
Elroy didn't think he'd done anything wrong. "I know nothing about his wife, or his husband for that matter. I don't ask and I'm not out to break up his home. Lighten up, man. Everybody does it. It's not like I'm going to freaking marry this dude. I'm only having a little fun with him. You wanna come with me? We'll have a three-way. You should see the way this guy moves. It will blow your mind."
With that remark Kyle shoved his hands into his pockets and walked faster. "No, thank you. That's not something I'm interested in doing. Meeting nice, decent people is the only thing that blows my mind. I just hope you're using condoms, you goddman asshole. — Ryan Field

I believe deeply in a common humanity. The black man belongs to the family of man. One part of that family is out of control - like a virus or cancer - and that is the white man. He and his technological society are bent on destroying the world. Everywhere the white man has gone with his empire, he has destroyed people, races, societies, cultures, and in the course of it, has sterilized himself. He is completely the mechanical man: without heart, without soul. He is the Tin Man of The Wizard of Oz. But I don't believe that all the white people in the world are no good. — Margaret Walker

We are all inspired by the incredible stories of handicapped people who write novels with their toes, cancer victims who run marathons for cancer research, bereaved parents who set up memorial funds for their lost children. How much easier is it for most of us to be small heroes simply by taking responsibility for our daily lives and transcending our ordinary obstacles? — Danah Zohar

For people who are afraid to talk about cancer, for people who are afraid to communicate with their loved ones about it, and for the people who want to pretend cancer doesn't exist, either delaying diagnosis or not getting regular checkups, the consequences can be fatal. Doing nothing about cancer will kill you. — Marlee Matlin

It's absurd that the same word is used to describe someone raping, torturing, mutilating, and killing a child; and someone stopping that perpetrator by shooting him in the head. The same word used to describe a mountain lion killing a deer by one quick bite to the spinal column is used to describe a civilized human playing smackyface with a suspect's child, or vaporizing a family with a daisy cutter. The same word often used to describe breaking a window is used to describe killing a CEO and used to describe that CEO producing toxins that give people cancer the world over. Check that: the latter isn't called violence, it's called production. — Derrick Jensen

An overweight officer, having delivered a batch of children to the home, started telling one of the guards about his heart problem. "You think you want to be a cop, but you don't, because it kills you," said the officer, mopping his brow. Then he told of another officer with a lung problem, and one who had cancer, and of others who were stress-sick, and of how none of them earned enough to afford decent doctors. Abdul hadn't previously thought of policemen as people with hearts and lungs who worried about money or their health. The world seemed replete with people as bad off as himself, and this made him feel less alone. — Katherine Boo

Mol, it's not probably nothing if they fucking want you to go to Germany."
She winced, and he turned to the people-mostly women- who were filling most of those waiting room seat.
"Excuse me. This doctor thinks my wife, whom I love more than life, has breast cancer, so I'm going to say fuck probably about ten more times. Is that okay with all of you? — Suzanne Brockmann

One time there was a student at Punjab University in Lahore who came down with cancer and his friend came to me for help. I stood outside on the street in Lahore and asked the people in that city for help. Within four or five hours, I received more than 40 million rupees [more than US $670,000]. — Abdul Sattar Edhi