quotations about cancer
Cancer ... the process of creation gone wild, I thought.
PHILIP K. DICK
Radio Free Albemuth
Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.
NATALIE PALMER
Second Kiss
She'd never been big on church before, but as soon as we landed on cancer planet she went so over-the-top Jesucristo that I think she would have nailed herself to a cross if she'd had one handy.
JUNOT DIAZ
This Is How You Lose Her
Cancer does not have a face until it's yours or someone you know.
ANTHONY DEL MONTE
People wonder why cancer exists when it is just a clever method to teach people lessons about love and loss. It borrows time or steals it depending on the needs of Heaven. It is a vehicle to get us where we need to be. It calls us home because something needs us there.
KATE & JACK MCAFGHAN
Return from Rainbow Bridge
Cancer is a "battle." People with cancer are "fighters," and if they don't die from the disease, they are "survivors." These are ... the words most people in our culture use to talk about the disease. So what's the problem? The problem is one of language. We have a tendency to foist heroism upon people with cancer in a way that might, at first glance, seem generous and celebratory. But it can also be damaging.... I'm sure there are people with cancer who appreciate the gladiatorial allegory. The everyday struggles people with cancer face--from the incapacitating side effects of treatment to the occasional proximity of death--may share more than a bit of common ground with actual soldiers fighting a war. And when I watched my mom face the disease, the word "fight" did, indeed, often strike me as an apt description of her efforts to get out of bed or eat a spoonful of yogurt. But saddling people with cancer with Herculean expectations fails to acknowledge that it is absolutely normal to feel afraid, to feel like you can't go on, to actually want to give up. And sometimes making this choice--if it can even be called that--is an OK thing to do, a humane response to an inhumane situation.
ELIZA BERMAN
"The Most Moving Thing About Stuart Scott's Speech at the ESPYs", Slate, July 17, 2014
The cancer-is-war metaphor does not seem to allow space for the idea that in actual war, some soldiers die heroically for the larger good, no matter which side wins. War is death. In the cancer war, if you die, you've lost and cancer has won. The dead are responsible not just for getting cancer, but also for failing to defeat it.
ALANNA MITCHELL
Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths