#cancer

The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken. ↗

— Audre Lorde

#cancer

It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace... ↗

— John Green

#cancer #pain #sad #sorrow #sorrowful

Because that’s what unfaithfulness is, isn’t it? A cancer that’s always there in the back of your mind, eating away at the foundations of the relationship. It’s happened once, it could happen again, so you’re always looking for telltale signs or symptoms to show that it’s reappeared... ↗

— Matt Dunn

#relationships #cancer

God had not abandoned us. He was actively working behind the scenes, when I had no means or spirit to fight. ↗

— K. Howard Joslin

#faith #opponents #trials #faith

Until I was diagnosed with mouth cancer, I'd never heard of it. ↗

— Jack Wild

#diagnosed #heard #i #mouth #never

I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die. ↗

— John Green

#death #death

We Let the Boat Drift I set out for the pond, crossing the ravine where seedling pines start up like sparks between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine. The grass in the field would make a second crop if early autumn rains hadn't washed the goodness out. After the night's hard frost it makes a brittle rustling as I walk. The water is utterly still. Here and there a black twig sticks up. It's five years today, and even now I can't accept what cancer did to him -- not death so much as the annihilation of the whole man, sense by sense, thought by thought, hope by hope. Once we talked about the life to come. I took the Bible from the nightstand and offered John 14: "I go to prepare a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said. "But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" And he wept. My neighbor honks and waves driving by. She counsels troubled students; keeps bees; her goats follow her to the mailbox. Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddles rested across our laps; glittering drops fell randomly from their tips. The light around us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant- let us get quite close before it dove, coming up after a long time, and well away from humankind ↗

— Jane Kenyon

#comfort #dying #nature #death

Cancer seems a high price to pay for an innocuous-looking habit. You get into smoking and you are robbed of the last 25 years of your life. Some cocky souls will say, 'Ah yes, but they are the worst 25 years.' Nobody feels like that in a cancer ward. There are no cocky souls in a cancer ward. But there's a lot of pain, not just of the excruciating physical kind that they shoot you full of morphine to smother. There are a lot of tears. All round. It is hard to say goodbye to the people you love. And it's scary. Cancer wards have a way of knocking the cockiness out of you. And for what? Another cigarette? ↗

— Tony Parsons

#cigarettes #smoking #life

An estimated 2 million American women will be diagnosed with breast or cervical cancer this decade and screening could prevent up to 30% of these deaths for women over 40. ↗

— Matthew Lesko

#american women #cancer #could #deaths #decade

I always sort of thought, 'I'm probably going to get breast cancer. There's a really good chance.' ↗

— Cynthia Nixon

#breast cancer #cancer #chance #get #going