Quotes from Arthur W. Frank

The demand being made of me was to treat the breakdown as if fear and frustration were not a part of it, to act as if my life, the whole life, has not changed.

Once the body has known death, it never lives the same again.

We are free only when we no longer require health, however much we may prefer it.

If we lived in a less healthist, capitalist, and hierarchical society, which spent less time finding ways to exclude and disenfranchise people and more time finding ways to include and enhance the potentialities of everyone, then there wouldn't have been so much for me to overcome

It may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self.

After I heard that I had had a heart attack, how I lived in my body changed, and my doctor should have found a way to let me know he recognized that.

The ill or impaired may, in the sense of fulfilling life, be far more free than healthy people.

When I was very ill, I watched people out running and loved their capacity for movement, their freedom within their bodies. My hope was that they also valued what they were able to be.

The voices that speak to us at particular moments in our lives, especially during transitions or crises, imprint themselves with a force that later voices never quite displace.

Broyard concludes that "it may not be dying we fear so much, but the diminished self

At home there were cards and calls from friends and family. I heard from people I had not seen in years and was surprised they even knew I had cancer. These messages in particular gave me what I think ill people need most, a sense that many others, more than you can think of, care deeply that you live.

The past is remembered with such arresting lucidity because it is not being experienced as past; the illness experiences that are being told are unassimilated fragments that refuse to become past, haunting the present.

Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person's sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.

The pedagogy of suffering means that one who suffers has something to teach, just as Gail claims, and thus has something to give, as Mairs recognizes.

Reflection on memory makes the self an object of wonder—an astonishment previously reserved for the contemplation of the world.

Nancy Mairs writes that calamities "have a genius of their own.