ILLNESS QUOTES
quotations about illness
The best thing about being ill is being able to watch daytime TV without feeling guilty.
BESS MACPHERSON
A Smoker's and Dog's Guide to the Gal-Alexy
Disease is not a negative event, a blind fate, waiting to be eliminated from the world by technological intervention; the important thing is what we make of it, whether we consider it as an occasion to reconsider and improve our life.
HENK TEN HAVE
"The Zapping Animal: Oscillating Images of the Human Person in Modern Medicine", Life the Human Being between Life and Death
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.
CHARLES LAMB
"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia
A Man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he love you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.
LAUREN BACALL
Lauren Bacall By Myself
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
JOSEPH CONRAD
Lord Jim
Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.
GILLIAN FLYNN
Sharp Objects
Being ill is above all alienation from the world.
F. J. J. BUYTENDIJK
Prolegomena to an Anthropological Physiology
The misery of being ill is already, in itself, an encompassing state of being, but the acceptance of fate and long-term circumstance creates a "final person."
DOUG DOBRANSKY
Autumn Sister
It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.
ELLYN BACHE
The Art of Saying Goodbye
My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness -- and the healthiest way of being ill -- is one most purified of, more resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it had been landscaped.
GEORGE SEBASTIAN ROUSSEAU
Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses
It is not necessarily the greatest suffering that receives the greatest consideration and sympathy. Illness is not scored that way. Deadly disease obviously scores higher than others. After that there is an unofficial ranking system for illness in which psychiatric disorders are the out-and-out losers. Psychiatric disorders manifesting as physical disease are at the very bottom of that pile. They are the charlatans of illnesses. We laugh at them.
SUZANNE O'SULLIVAN
Is It All In Your Head?
It matters not whether you place the sick man on a wooden bed or one of gold; wherever you lay him, he carries his disease along with him.
SENECA
attributed, Day's Collacon
It is idle to propose remedies before we are assured of the disease.
JONATHAN SWIFT
A Modest Address to the Wicked Authors of the Present Age
I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.
JOHN GREEN
Turtles All the Way Down
Disease is sometimes worse than death.
PHERECYDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Sickness is a belief, to be annihilated by the divine Mind.
MARY BAKER EDDY
Science and Health
Being ill is being in a condition that falls short of how a human being ought to be and, in that sense, is "disordered."
ERIC MATTHEWS
"Personal Identity and Mental Health", Personhood and Health Care
Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.
SIGMUND FREUD
The Question of Lay Analysis
The ill are damped with pain and anguish at the sight of all that is laudable, lovely, or happy.
JOSEPH ADDISON & RICHARD STEELE
History, Opinions, and Lucubrations, of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq
Today's patient dies, too, in a social milieu in which being ill is a defeat, an automatic ejection from the cult of youth and health. The dying person intrudes on everyone else's pursuit of business or pleasure. In the modern world, dying is an obscenity.
HARVEY M. CHOCHINOV & WILLIAM BREITBART
"The Existential State of Incurability", Handbook of Psychiatry in Palliative Medicine