Quotes About Illness

it?" "Friday, April fourth, ma'am." She coughs. Then she doubles over and coughs

When she leaves, I inspect my reflection in the mirror—the first time since arriving in Minnesota I've looked in a whole piece of mirror unclouded by spots and damage. A girl I barely recognize stares back. She is thin and pale, dull eyed, with sharp cheekbones and matted dark red hair, wind-chapped cheeks, and a red-rimmed nose. Her lips are scabbed, and her sweater is pilled and soiled with dirt. I swallow—she swallows. My throat hurts. I must be getting sick.

Maisie sensed it first. She wouldn't stop crying. Since she was a month old, when our mother got sick,

and maybe it was the spirit of her dead mother sickening her, or maybe it was her inability to grieve a person she should, by biological rights, have grieved, but as with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Because the doctors could not cure me, they decided I could not be sick. They told me it was all in my head. Namely, I was to blame. I was the sickness.

But my illness, even in its absence, made it hard for me to enjoy life. Good health means being unaware of one's health. I was not yet unaware.

but as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

She was much too thin. She was serene, like someone accustomed to sickness, someone who layed back to back with it in bed.

I would do anything," he said in quiet desperation, "even going to prison, if she could only be well again.

To share in this sacred meal was so deeply felt to be the essential expression of membership of the society that fragments of the broken bread were taken round to any who were absent through illness or imprisonment.

In just a few decades, dramatic changes have occurred in our relationship to stress. There are many illnesses that are now associated with stress—and they have become epidemic in scope.

He was transferred on a Friday afternoon – never a good time to fall seriously ill

My subsequent life as a neurosurgeon was to teach me that the distinction between physical and psychological illness is false – at least, that illnesses of the mind are no less real than those of the body, and no less deserving of our help.

My brother's death: wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying.

What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and the only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.

But besides that, however painful the mother's fear of illnesses, the illnesses themselves, and the distress at seeing signs of bad inclinations in her children, the children themselves repaid her griefs with small joys. These joys were so small that they could not be seen, like gold in the sand, and in her bad moments she saw only griefs, only sand; but there were also good moments, when she saw only joys, only gold.

At the bottom of his heart Ivan Ilych knew that he was dying; but so far from growing used to this idea, he simply did not grasp it - he was utterly unable to grasp it.

Duke Ercole's condition deteriorated and he lay listening to the gentle music on his favorite clavichord. Sinking slowly, with the family gathered about his bed, Ercole beat time to the music with his hand.

Over the course of those ten days of his illness, all of the men who were to be the first five caliphs of Islam would be in and out of his sickroom: two fathers-in-law, abu-Bakr and Omar; two sons-in-law, Ali and Uthman; and a brother-in-law, Muawiya. But how that would happen, and in what order, was to remain the stuff of discord.

I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.   You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.   Their evil is mighty but it can't stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then.

Addiction is a chronic disease of the brain and it's one that we have to treat the way we would any other chronic illness: with skill, with compassion and with urgency.

When I get a really bad bout of painful bloating and that urgency that I need to go to the toilet, and I'm out on a night out with my friends, there's been times when I've had to leave and go back. Because there's no way I want to be in that situation where I'm in a club and really unwell.