Quotes from Susan Gubar

Through their visual and literary lines, Rilke and Kahlo seem to attain a sense of personal equanimity by entertaining the secular import of Thomas Browne's assertion that "there is something in us, that can be without us, and will be after us.

That night (as on all nights), when the lights get turned out, Don and I lie on our backs side by side with his left hand cradling my right. "I worry that this sickness is taking over your life, Bear," I murmur in the dark now permeated by a bathroom nightlight he has just affixed. "I have no other life," he responds while gently stroking my fingers. "I don't know what to hope for," I whisper. "Let's hope for a good summer," he says.

parting looms imminent as death takes dominion over that place in the body framed and famed for giving birth to life. Despite my antipathies toward current treatments, all are designed to make death delay its dominion over the center of the body.

Yet intimations of mortality whispered something else in my ear—namely, that I will love my family and friends until death departs, and since death will never depart, I will love them always and forever.

I will love you beyond my death. I will love you from another space that you will palpably feel, and feel to be me loving you." Albeit confused, that declaration seemed to speak of the intense emotions sustained by the urgent desire to continue loving the beloved until and after death. I want to live as long as the people I love live. We will live so long as the people we love remember we love them.

Nancy Mairs, a contemporary thinker about disability and dying, wrests with "the psychological 'undeadness' of the dead—a consolatory consciousness of the beloved as present though elsewhere." Such a conviction reflects faith in death as the end of personal consciousness but the beginning of a translation "into an existence no less authentic for my inability to read it.

life without the finitude of death—the inconceivable finality of one's own death—would be intolerable.

Marie de Hennezel, a French psychologist who works with the terminally ill, believes that "the person who can say to someone else 'I am going to die' does not become the victim of death but, rather, the protagonist in his or her own dying.

If there weren't so many damned umlauts in Pema's last name—it is a royal pain to find the damned symbol list—she might be worth consulting and quoting, for she believes that "when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this." Can I learn to deepen compassion by realizing that my distress is shared, that there are many other people all over the world feeling pain worse than mine?

Why I can report on a computer keyboard what I cannot bear to say aloud remains a mystery to me, but so it goes. Maybe my inability to speak propelled the obsessive reading and writing.

I want the quiet concentration of each everyday task to fill me with an active love of living and a passive acceptance of dying

The interwoven branches of the firs droop from the weight, bendable but not brittle. I want to be just as still and somehow pliable and permanent in each moment of being alive, to ponder how transient and yet how pregnant each instant feels.

Remission is a word that signifies absolution. As Google will guess if you begin typing it, the term "remission of cancer" derives from and echoes "the remission of sins.

How to distinguish the general noise of the midlife or aging body from meaningful signals that portend danger? In difficult-to-obtain books published primarily by small presses or self-published, the testimonies of women underscore the need for an early detection tool, given the vagaries of symptoms

Diseased ovaries still represented a deviation from standard femininity, but a differently defined femininity. If nineteenth-century women were thought to develop ovarian disease because of too much libido, their twentieth-century descendants apparently had too little.

As a monopoly, Myriad could set unreasonable prices and limit accessibility of services by denying certain types of insurance. Though genetic patents are being debated in the courts today, the profit motive continues to curtail available responses.

It is one thing to renounce willfulness, another to be robbed of willingness.

Terry Tempest Williams: "I look at Mother and I see myself," she writes during her period of caretaking; or worse: "A person with cancer dies in increments, and a part of you slowly dies with them.

The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of "imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself," argues that this process is "the basis of all sympathy": "Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.