Quotes About Cancer

When I first came out about my breast cancer, I didn't want to talk about it, but I had to, because young women were getting it, and people weren't understanding that.

When I was younger, I used to pray that I would die before my mom. That's just how much my mom meant to me. I couldn't imagine being in this world without her. But then seeing cancer - seeing what it can do to somebody - as strong and as tough as she was, there was nothing she could do. Cancer is a dirty, dirty deal.

My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.

I'm the youngest of four boys, and my oldest brother, Todd, was like a father figure to me. We were very close even though we were 23 years apart. When my parents were working, he was the one there for me. He was diagnosed with lung cancer when he was 15 years old.

Cancer is a disease of the genome. And that's what happens. You make mistakes in a cell somewhere in your body that causes it to start to grow when it should've stopped, and that's cancer. And those mistakes are mistakes of DNA.

As a cancer survivor of a radical hysterectomy, there are complications that happen after the fact and your body changes and, going through those changes, you don't feel sexy.

Your body thinks radium is a great thing to pack into bone - where it kills some cells outright and scrambles the DNA of others, causing problems like cancer.

Cancer is real-time evolution, and your body is the selective pressure.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone's got to go sometime. I've came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

Just when your ovaries should be brimming with youthful follicles, cancerous cells overtook mine, threatening to end my fertility and potentially my life.

Maybe now, instead of being afraid and saying, 'Look how hard Terry tried, and he still got cancer,' instead people will say, 'Look at the effort he put in, and he died of cancer. We're really going to have to try hard in order to beat it - harder than we ever have before.'

The only thing I want to sponsor is cancer, and cancer can be beaten. Not any other product. And I hope nobody tries to use me, because I won't let them.

Traveling gave me the opportunity to reinvent myself. You can imagine my excitement when, one year after my bone marrow transplant and two years after my cancer diagnosis, my doctors gave me permission to take my first big trip since cancer. Freedom, finally!

When my wife was six years old, her father was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer and was given a 10% chance to live. He wanted to travel the world with his family while he could, so on these trips she got to see her father be excited to be with the family.

Like a lot of other cancer patients lying in hospital beds or in chemotherapy suites, I have spent a fair amount of time fantasizing about jetting off to a tropical island.

Although the elusive 'cure' may be a distant dream, understanding the true nature of cancer will enable it to be better controlled and less menacing.

In retrospect, I have devoted my scientific life mainly to the question to what extent infectious agents contribute to human cancer, trusting that this will contribute to novel modes of cancer prevention, diagnosis and, hopefully, later on, also to cancer therapy.

Racism is a cancer that America does not want to cure.

Hodgkin's is serious and I don't want to be dismissive about it, but there are people who have gone through much worse and lost their lives to cancer.

I think any cancer patient, if you dig not too deeply, they want to live.

trawl through the history of cancer research draws one up sharp: almost everything we know today about cancer – as a disease of the cells and of the genes – was suggested by someone way back before scientists had any way of testing their ideas, and who is often forgotten by those who later reveal them as facts when the world is more ready to listen.

The research community became fixated on an 'accelerator' model of cancer – one in which the normal mechanism of cell division is being actively reprogrammed by these 'rogue' genes, the oncogenes, to go into overdrive, thus causing the cells to proliferate wildly. This was the mindset at the time p53 was discovered in 1979.

This means that from a molecular viewpoint there is one basic condition to get a cancer: p53 must be switched off. If p53 is on, and hence functioning properly, cancer will not develop.

The 're-embryonisation of cancer cells' was an attractive concept because of the obvious behavioural similarities between the two cell types, embryonic and cancer, and the hunt was on in a number of labs to identify proteins that were present in both normal embryo cells and tumour cells, but not in healthy, fully developed adult cells.