Quotes About Illness

Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.

I understand there's a history of madness in your family.

Illness "controlled her without making her feel that her liberty was invaded,

I was stunned by the way my mother's body was being taken to pieces, how each new week brought a new failure, how surreal the disintegration of a body was.

The more I talked to sick people. the more I found that what is most disturbing for many of is is that grace has become a kind of moral requirement in sickness: If you must be ill, at least be improved by your illness. And yet conditions under which grace can emerge may not be present.

On my message boards a recurrent theme was having a partner who didn't help, who didn't get it, who even judged and blamed. Even partners who did help often couldn't feel the wave of need engulfing the ill person. And my god, the need. It felt shameful to need other people so much.

be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you're sick, the act of living is more act than living. Healthy people have the luxury of forgetting that their existence depends on a cascade of precise cellular interactions. Not you.

Onlookers often respond to the experience of chronically ill people by focusing on the supposed positives, presumably because it makes the pain of witness bearable.

I think: it's the holidays. There are parties. I'm young. I've spent the past two years going to oncologists. I'm going to put on my party shoes. And I do go to one party, and I leave when people start to dance around a pole. Later I start dating the man whose party it was, and he remembers being glad I came, and casually tells me how he flirted his head off that night. I'm not in your country, I think. I haven't lived in your country for a while.

I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: "gradually and then suddenly.

You cannot muscle your way to health when you are chronically ill. Rather, one way of coming to terms with an amorphous systemic disease is recognizing that you are sick, that the illness will come and go, and that it is not the kind of illness you can conquer.

My experience of being ill led me to see that our bodies may feel autonomous, but we all live in the nexus of radical interconnection. Our bodies are always in communication with other bodies: our immune system is responsive not only to collective health policies but also to the emotions and affects of others.

felt a prickle at the special horror of being not only ill but also marginalized—your testimony dismissed because your lab work fails to match a preexisting pattern.

One does not have to be Christian to see that [John] Donne was right. To be ill is to recognize this interconnectedness -- to understand how much we are "a part of the main." But to be ill in America today is to be brought up against the pathology of a culture that denies this fact. In the worst moments of my illness, I was alone because of the ways that we have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than the community, must do all the healing.

As Virginia Woolf testified in On Being Ill, "English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.

So challenging was living with an unidentified illness that she welcomed the terrible news with what sounds like excitement.

As Susan Sontag pointedly observes in Illness as Metaphor, illnesses we don't understand are frequently viewed as manifestations of inner states. The less we understand about a disease or a symptom, the more we psychologize, and often stigmatize, it.

My narrative is not a neat one. Which version of the story of my illness I tell depends on what month, what day, even what hour I do so, and whether my symptoms are in the background or the foreground.

As the chronically ill know, to be alive is to be in uncertainty.

If medicine can't see or name the problem, it can neither study it nor treat it.

Is illness, in any way, a lesson? Illness is a travesty; illness is shit; illness is not redemptive unless it happens to be for a particular ill person, for reasons that are not replicable nor should they be said to be so.

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.

This morning, my mother didn't get out of bed.

I find I can't really describe what Mia has. People want symptoms. They want physical evidence. This thing my mum has is like the X-Files. It can't be explained to the non-believers.