Quotes & Sayings About Someone Having Cancer

With something like cancer, there is a feeling that you can fight it in some way or control your response to it, but with dementia there is the fear of losing control of your mind and your life. — Kevin Whately

Telling someone with depression to pull themselves together is about as useful as telling someone with cancer to just stop having cancer — Ricky Gervais

It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines. — Isaac Asimov

The virus-to-cancer connection is where medicinal mushrooms offer unique opportunities for medical research. — Paul Stamets

86. I get angry when believers unhesitatingly attribute every good thing in the world to God - and then respond to bad things by saying, "God works in mysterious ways." If God's ways are so mysterious, and we can't begin to understand his thinking behind tsunamis and drought and pediatric cancer, then what makes you think you understand his intentions when it comes to pretty sunsets or cute puppies or helping you find the peanut butter? — Greta Christina

Studies of cancer patients show that attitudes of mind have very little effect on clinical outcome. We may say we are fighting cancer, but cancer is merely fighting us; we may think we have beaten it, when it has only gone away to regroup. It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. — Julian Barnes

One of my patients told me that when she tried to tell her story people often interrupted her to tell her that they once had something just like that happen to them. Subtly her pain became a story about themselves. Eventually she stopped talking to most people. It was just too lonely. We connect through listening. When we interrupt what someone is saying to let them know that we understand, we move the focus of attention to ourselves. When we listen, they know we care. Many people with cancer talk about the relief of having someone just listen. — Rachel Naomi Remen

I am the sky and nothing can stick to me. The sky is open and vast and stays unchanged no matter what; it is always the sky. A storm can roll through it, an airplane can roar through, and it is always the sky. — Geralyn Lucas

I am committed to ovarian cancer research on a national level and in my community in the Carolinas. It is important to me to know the women that are true fighters of this difficult disease. — Andie MacDowell

Enoki mushrooms, a tasty variety commonly sold in grocery stores, were one of the first mushrooms studied for preventing cancer. — Paul Stamets

Ann prayed because of a gut-wrenching, throbbing pain in her soul. She urgently begged the Lord for her life. — K. Howard Joslin

Where does my body end and an invader start? And cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue. How does that happen? Where does medical ability end and start? — Dave DeBronkart

I told her that the pills will let her slip off and that when a person dies there comes a long clean sleep."
"That's all," Alexandria whispers, echoing after her, "a long clean sleep. — Annie Fisher

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

Imagine the spirit as a mansion. You'll guess we don't use many rooms. Apart from a few moments in childhood we don't dance around it in sunlight. But there's a traffic of things in and out, and what happens is that unwanted bulks can gather inside. Gather and gather, menacing us. Unable to shift them, we hide in ever-smaller spaces. And in our last hole, life offers a choice: to play out our demise in parallel theatres - psychosis, zealotry, religion, cancer, addiction - or to bow quietly out. But beware: life doesn't ask these high questions when we're confident and fresh - it waits for hopelessness. — D.B.C. Pierre

I thought I knew what fear was, until I heard the words 'You have cancer'. — Lance Armstrong

We are not dealing with a scientific problem. We are dealing with a political issue. — Samuel Epstein

I see racism as a cancer. It is a cancer growing in us. Unless we stop it, it vegetates and grows bigger which hurts every one of us. — Pearl Tan

Cancer was a merciless executioner. It stripped away dignity and autonomy, leaving only pain and horror in its wake. — Catie Rhodes

I think cancer is a hard battle to fight alone or with another person at your side, but I will say having someone to pick you up when you fall, stand by your side through every appointment and delivery of bad news, is priceless. — Jenna Morasca

Nothing I did contributed to me having cancer, so I can't sit back and say, 'Oh why me.' Why not me? Why does tragedy always have to hit someone else? — Eric Davis

It's often pretty hard to speak to others about my cancer. I have a number of pet peeves. Many folks are overly solicitous. They can't do enough for you. There's that Kaiser nurse who keeps asking "Isn't there someone who can drive you here?" And some people are too prying. I think they are voyeuristic and attempt to satisfy their morbid curiosity about having cancer. I don't like that and have sometimes wanted to say, "Go get your own damn fatal illness. — Irvin D. Yalom

There's a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it's really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can't ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it's quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia's the sane realisation you just can't be doing with all that anymore. — Glen Duncan

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

Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Courage is not the absence of fear — Richard Stengel

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Shame was one of those things that had to be excised like a cancer, but it was a hard thing to remove when it was wrapped around your heart. — Simon Wood

I'm not one of those people who think that cancer is some kind of jousting match. People live or die based on good medicine, good luck, and the grace of God. The people that die from it did not fail. The people who live will die another day. — Paul Acampora

I'm one of those people that will say, 'My cancer was a gift.' — Melissa Etheridge

Cancer is an emotional disease. — Marina Abramovic

The word 'cancer' carries with it enormous fear, fear for the future, fear for family. — Wayne Swan

My family and I participate in 'Cycle for Survival.' it was started by a friend of my wife's who lost his wife to a rare form of cancer. — Brian Krzanich

My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him. — Rachel Joyce

Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker. — Christopher Hitchens

This "Not Today" attitude of yours is a cancer. Cancer of the character. It stunts your growth. — David Mitchell

You're giving me lung cancer. — Rainbow Rowell

Quentin flicked a quick glance back at her again. Poppy. This girl had the wrong name. She should have been Rose. Great face, lots of prickles. — Ros Baxter

Cancer had a chance to break me down, but I was determined to fight back with strength and positivity. — Samantha Harris

My family has had a lot of trouble with cancer in particular. There are a lot of great causes out there but for me to pick one I would say anything that is cancer related. — Casey James

All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last. — Aldous Huxley

I had uterine cancer, which is the most under-funded and under-researched of all the female cancers. — Fran Drescher