Sick And Illness Quotes & Sayings

For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you. — Chris Cleave

The worst thing about pills was that they worked. Without them, you might just adapt; medical optimism suspended you in a maintenance reality. He'd never known how sick he was until he'd gotten health insurance. The pill that really wanted inventing was the bitter one that cured you of optimism and made time go faster. — Tony Tulathimutte

Don't say that," he said harshly. Rowan studied Lily for a long time. "Do you know what it means to be a survivor? It means that not only do you have to live through things, you have to live with them as well. The second part is much harder and sometimes it takes the rest of your life to learn how to do it. But at least you have the rest of your life, Lily. And that's what's important to me."
"Oh, I'm alive," she said ruefully, "Even if I am damaged."
"You'll heal," Rowan replied confidently. — Josephine Angelini

I once saw many flowers blooming
Upon my way, in indolence
I scorned to pick them in my going
And passed in proud indifference.
Now, when my grave is dug, they taunt me;
Now, when I'm sick to death in pain,
In mocking torment still they haunt me,
Those fragrant blooms of my disdain. — Heinrich Heine

Among wise men there is no place at all left for hatred. For no one except the greatest of fools would hate good men. And there is no reason at all for hating the bad. For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind. And if this is so, since we think of people who are sick in body as deserving sympathy rather than hatred, much more so do they deserve pity rather than blame who suffer an evil more severe than any physical illness. — Boethius

To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption. — Richard Hofstadter

Such planetary alignments are thought to lead to local miasmas: concentrations of fetid air and noxious vapors. These miasmas are then blown on the wind and enter men's and women's bodies through the pores of their skin. once inside they disrupt the balance of the 'humours (the substances believed to control the body's functions), and people fall sick. — Ian Mortimer

I arrived back home just before midnight, and Marlboro Man met me at the car. I could hear nothing but cows and crickets when I climbed out of my car and into his arms, which were strong and warm and comforting. I was a wreck--sick to my stomach and even more sick in my heart--and Marlboro Man helped me to the house, as if I were crippled by a terminal illness. I was completely beat, hardly able to finish my shower before I fell into bed with Marlboro Man, who rubbed my back as I tried with all my might to keep from throwing up, breaking down, and completely saturating my red floral pillowcase with tears. — Ree Drummond

According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.
Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him. — John Green

The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness, and the confinement of a sick-chamber, is above the conceptions, as well as the descriptions, of those in health. — Ann Radcliffe

Once, in a three-day taping that included several sadists, the material was so overwhelming that both the film crew and I got sick - I with a sinus infection, and the entire film crew with a flu so severe they had to delay their departure from the motel. Our immune systems had weakened, I believe, from the beating out souls had taken. — Anna C. Salter

If a culture treats a particular illness with compassion and enlightened understanding, then sickness can be seen as a challenge, as a healing crisis and opportunity. Being sick is then not a condemnation or a moral judgement, but a movement in a larger process of healing and restoration. When sickness is viewed positively and in supportive terms, then illness has a much better chance to heal, with the concomitant result that the entire person may grown and be enriched in the process. — Ken Wilber

My mother's illness fitted into this protest against the treatment of the sick who could not pay, the inefficiency of commercialism, the waste, the extravagance, and the poverty. — Ellen Wilkinson

We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age. — Thomas Szasz

As a child, I had a serious illness that lasted for two years or more. I have vague recollections of this illness and of my being carried about a great deal. I was known as the 'sick one.' Whether this illness gave me a twist away from ordinary paths, I don't know; but it is possible. — Jacob Epstein

In about an 18-month period, my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience. — Meghan Daum

do not only describe your situation, that event, that person, place or that thing. By describing, we limit our thoughts in pondering. We ought to prescribe. The sick describes his illness to the doctor and the doctor prescribes an antidote. We all do have stories to tell in life, we all do face challenges each day, and likewise we experience joyous moments; that is life. To espouse an unpopular cause, prescribe a great antidotes to every life occurrence from daybreak to sunset. Remember prefer prescribe to describe! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

When we sacrifice our own well-being in the hopes that our sacrifice will help someone else, we just get two people who are living sub-optimal lives. Here's the truth: Getting sick does not help those who are suffering of illness. Being sad does nothing to pull someone out of their own depression. And being hungry doesn't feed the starving. The universe simply doesn't work that way. — Kate Northrup

Wellness is cheaper than illness. It costs us time and money when children get sick. — Thomas Carper

You cannot drive a system that's going to be aiming at preventing illness if everyone is not in it. The whole gaming of health insurance and health care in America is based on that fundamental principle: insure people who aren't sick and you don't have to pay more money on them. — Mehmet Oz

The 2ams have held my hopes all these years as I calm my nerves down for there would only be three more hours for the world to wake up to my screams and wails of excruciating pain.
Probably the drug store would open if I wait for three more hours then.
8am and the doc would prescribe me a few medicines over whatsapp.
I would make three cups of tea by then. I would quiet my mouth as it would bite on my arm.
By twelve I would finally be relieved as the meds would work.
But it's only midnight now... wish you another goodnight's sleep.... — Sanhita Baruah

When my father died, I was 21, and he'd been sick for a few years. He changed during his illness. He kind of softened during it. — Luanne Rice

While the first few explosions might be written off as coincidence, or even bad luck, somewhere around the tenth destroyed vehicle a little light came on inside my head. I finally understood that no one could be this unlucky. There was only one possible explanation. You're sick in the head. The psychiatric community calls your specific mental illness Munchausen's by Proxy. A parent, usually the mother, purposely makes her children sick so she can bask in the attention and sympathy of others. — J.A. Konrath

We have a dysfunctional dream of the planet, and humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear. The symptoms of the disease are all the emotions that make humans suffer: anger, hate, sadness, envy, and betrayal. When the fear is too great, the reasoning mind begins to fail, and we call this mental illness. — Miguel Ruiz

A chronic invalid has but one thought about his identity: He doesn't want to be a sick man. The rest of the discussion seems frivolous to him-an immense privilege of the healthy. Still, I'm a novelist, and so I pursue it. — Nancy Horan

Take The Walk is not about individuals becoming great in order to impact the world, it is about discovering the greatness of individuals as they use what they already have to touch the lives of the dying, sick and poor. It is about normal people with careers, families, and responsibilities, asking 'How can what I already do and what I already am make a difference in lives half a world away? — Hanson

When our bodies are sick and people extend their sympathy, bring us soup, offer up solutions. When our minds are sick, people tend to shy away from you, be afraid, or call you outright crazy. I'm fascinated by the way society and individuals view mental illness, and most of my shorts comment on that. — Anna Akana

The sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated. He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress. — Michel De Certeau

Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there
put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet. — Daniel Handler

Anxiety is the illness of our age. We worry about ourselves, our family, our friends, our work, and our state of the world. If we allow worry to fill our hearts, sooner or later we will get sick. — Nhat Hanh

Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.
And that's why Mom is always so afraid. If we don't know what made me sick in the first place, how can anyone guarantee I won't flip out again? — Jeannine Garsee

But that is who we are, that is where we come from. We are the offspring of metropolitan annihilation and destruction, of the war of all against all, of the conflict of each individual with every other individual, of a system governed by fear, of the compulsion to produce, of the profit of one to the detriment of others, of the division of people into men and women, young and old, sick and healthy, foreigners and Germans, and of the struggle for prestige. Where do we come from? From isolation in individual row-houses, from the suburban concrete cities, from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of nonviolence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation, from the debasement of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism. — Ulrike Marie Meinhof

Mental illness

People assume you aren't sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways you're hurting.

My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?

Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.

Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they aren't ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.

Telling me there is no problem
won't solve the problem.

This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works. — Emm Roy

Infectious disease is one of the primary mechanisms of natural immunity. Whether we are sick or healthy, disease is always passing through our bodies. "Probably we're diseased all the time," as one biologist puts it, "but we're hardly ever ill." It is only when disease manifests as illness that we see it as unnatural, in the "contrary to the ordinary course of nature" sense of the word. When a child's fingers blacken on his hand from Hib disease, when tetanus locks a child's jaw and stiffens her body, when a baby barks for breath from pertussis, when a child's legs are twisted and shrunken with polio - then disease does not seem natural. — Eula Biss

It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Epidemiologists-scientists who study the spread of disease-use a special number to describe how contagious a virus is. It's called the basic reproduction number, or R0 for short. It's complicated to calculate but simple to understand-it counts how many people one sick person is expected to infect over the course of his or her illness. If I'm sick with a cold and I make two other people sick, the R0 of my virus is 2. Colds and seasonal flus typically have R0 values of around 1.5 to 2. The 1918 flu pandemic R0 was estimated to be 2 to 3, while diseases like polio and small pox have R0 values of around 5 to 7. — Jennifer Gardy

When a physical illness or other adverse circumstance arises, humans tend to add to the problem by worrying and increasing the mental anxiety in their situation. Let's take illness as an example. We have to face the fact that life is not always perfect and that disease occasionally happens. When you fall into a painful situation or get sick, the best thing to do is to think about the greater anguish being suffered by so many of our fellow creatures. This is more productive than being concerned about one's own suffering and compounding it with worry, giving too much attention to the pain — Doug "Ten" Rose

It was clear: I was sick. I never used to dream. They say in the old days it was the most normal thing in the world to have dreams. Which makes sense: Their whole life was some kind of horrible merry-go-round of green, orange, Buddha, juice. But today we know that dreams point to a serious mental illness. And I know that up to now my brain has checked out chronometrically perfect, a mechanism without a speck of dust. — Yevgeny Zamyatin

So long as men denounce each other as mentally sick (homosexual, addicted, insane, and so forth) so that the madman can always be considered the Other, never the Self mental illness will remain an easily exploitable concept, and Coercive Psychiatry a flourishing institution. — Thomas Szasz

SHAME-BASED FAMILIES AND MULTIGENERATIONAL ILLNESS One of the devastating aspects of toxic shame is that it is multigenerational. The secret and hidden aspects of toxic shame form the wellsprings of its multigenerational life. Since it is kept hidden, it cannot be worked out. Families are as sick as their toxic shame secrets. — John Bradshaw

Lilus shivers between two humid sheets. She doesn't know why she's sick. The illness surged without warning, traitorous, like a great wave of solitude. Health is an easily lost object:"But I had it in my hand, only a little while ago I saw it." That is how her illness was:"But only yesterday I was running on the stairway."
Lilus's illness wasn't a cold, nor the flu, nor a stomach ache. She tended to fall ill over something said to her. Upon hearing something unexpected, she became afraid. She wouldn't turn to anyone, nor did she want to be babied. Secretly she embraced her illness. She'd let herself be invaded by the feeling, and it would seem that the whole world penetrated her being. — Elena Poniatowska

And someone else wrote me, "What I want is to know your own experience of illness."

Why the interest?

People on their ailments are not always interesting, far from it. But we all hope for a - must I say the word - recipe, we all believe, however much we know we shouldn't, that maybe somebody's got that recipe and can show us how not to be sick, suffer and die. — Nan Shin

I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life. — Sylvia Plath

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. — Susan Sontag

It comes and goes. People think if you're sick you become fearless and brave, but you don't. Most of the time it's like being stalked by a psycho, like I might get shot any second. But sometimes I forget for hours.'
'What makes you forget?'
'People. Doing stuff. When I was with you in the wood, I forgot for a whole afternoon. — Jenny Downham

Illness and fatigue can be career ending. It mean the fans are sick and tired of you. — Vince Lombardi

Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use. — Catherine Lacey

I truly believed, in that moment, that having a psychological illness was just as bad as being physically ill, maybe worse. When you're physically ill, people can see what's wrong; they can help you fix it. When something's wrong inside the mind, all doctors can do is guess, and people can't tell if you're sick. They don't believe you a lot of times, until they see the outward signs of your sickness. Maybe you're walking aimlessly on the street talking to yourself, or you hurt someone you love. That type of sickness is harder to define, harder to fix, and scary, because in the end, the sickness is you. — Rachel Van Dyken

Here libido and ego-interest share the same fate and have once more become indistinguishable from each other. The familiar egoism of the sick person covers them both. We find it so natural because we are certain that in the same situation we should behave in just the same way. The way in which the readiness to love, however great, is banished by bodily ailments, and suddenly replaced by complete indifference, is a theme which has been sufficiently exploited by comic writers. — Sigmund Freud

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in. — Siri Hustvedt

Axiom: that illness isn't productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it's an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it. — Margaret Atwood

Love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing. ... I am not aware of any other factor in medicine - not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery - that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness, and premature death from all causes. — Brian L. Weiss

Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up. — Pete Earley

I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient. — Ornette Coleman

The poet found illness a convenient language for his skewed relation to normal life, for his inability at times to function, for his radical abdication of responsibilities. Illness offered, for decades, a comfortable way for him to think about himself. Ever the poet, he pretty much set up camp and lived in the metaphor of being sick. — Katie Roiphe

Nothing's scarier than having a sick child, and one so newly born, and so vulnerable. It's the worst thing for a parent. — Kenneth Oppel

A lot of our entertainment throws into detail the stagnation and illness of how we live today-it's sad and it's sick ... and it's profitable. — Heather Donahue

The "pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic. — Erich Fromm

Q: How do you take off your suit of armor? How do you open yourself? A: It is not a question of how you do it. There is no ritual or ceremony or formula for opening. The first obstacle is the question itself: "How?" If you don't question yourself, don't watch yourself, then you just do it. We do not consider how we are going to vomit; we just vomit. There is no time to think about it; it just happens. If we are very tense, then we will have tremendous pain and will not really be able to vomit properly. We will try to swallow it back, try to struggle with our illness. We have to learn to relax when we are sick. — Chogyam Trungpa

A closed conforming society is a sick society waiting to die from stagnation and inner illness. Only openness is the treatment. — Debasish Mridha

People get sick and sometimes they get better and sometimes they don't. And it doesn't matter if the sickness is cancer or if it's depression. Sometimes the drugs work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes the drugs work for a while and then they stop. Sometimes the alternative stuff works and sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes you wonder if no outside interference makes any difference at all; if an illness is like a storm, if it simply has to run its course and, at the end of it, depending on how robust you are, you will be alive. Or you will be dead. — Marian Keyes

I don't know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don't understand are at work. I cannot believe that God "sends" illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. "What did I do to deserve this?" is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is "If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?" As we saw in the previous chapter, it becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don't hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world. — Harold S. Kushner

The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness. — Michel De Certeau

A sick person is Allah's guest for as long as he is ill. Every day he is sick, God gives him countless rewards, as long as he says ' al hamdulillah', praise be
to God, and does not fight it and complain. When God returns to him his health, he expiates his sins and gives him the status of the newly-born
(completely pure and free of any sin). Illness is a mercy and a blessing. — Kristiane Backer

If we feel our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction to emotional problems which are not strange to us.
The Content of the Psychoses — C. G. Jung

This girl who's slept a hundred years has something after all. It's called Centuryitis, and it has turned me into a man. Oh, what will mamma think when she sees me?!
-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz — Karen Quan