Cancer Death Quotes

My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.'
'Oh.'
'But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long at all. ~ Anna Funder

Suffering can precipitate creativity, liberating the creator through inspiration and then many available channels of human communication, and therefore there is value in suffering. ~ Brent Green

In ten years time I'll be… (dead) sixty. ~ Neil Gaiman

The four most common cancers that account for about 80 percent of all cancer deaths are lung, breast, colorectal cancer, and prostate cancer. ~ Laurie Glimcher

I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it. ~ Iain M. Banks

Suffering creates a vivid contrast illuminating joy, happiness, and satisfaction. It is a harsh lesson on the other side of sublime. We all must suffer, whether we choose to or not. There must be value in that which is given in our lives, even though we hope and try to live joyfully and enjoy our brief time on earth. ~ Brent Green

According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life. ~ Pierre Berton

Cancer doesn't give a shit how much you want to live. If it wants to kill you, it will. ~ A.S. King

There's 6.5 billion people curled up like fists protesting death, but every breath we take has to be given back; a nine year old boy taught me that. ~ Shane Koyczan

Once people knew about the cancer, I wouldn't be able to stop them from talking about Val every time they saw me. And then I would stop being me, because my time was something I could only buy at home. ~ Melanie Conklin

It's all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.'
'Why are you saying that?'
'She might need permission to die, Cal.'
'I don't want her to. She doesn't have my permission. ~ Jenny Downham

I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much. ~ Gertrude B. Elion

Once,a boy told a girl : i will stay with you forever, little did she know that his forever is only three months because..he died of cancer! ~ Amal Sagheer

Jesus didn't have to extend His love. He didn't have to think of me when He went up on that cross. He didn't have to rewrite my story from one of beauty to one of brokenness and create a whole new brand of beauty. He simply didn't have to do it, but He did. He bought me. He bought me that day He died, and He showed His power when He overcame death and rose from the grave. He overcame my death in that moment. He overcame my fear of death in that unbelievable, beautiful moment, and the fruit of that death, that resurrection, and that stunning grace is peace. It is the hardest peace, because it is brutal. Horribly brutal and ugly, and we want to look away, but it is the greatest, greatest story that ever was. And it was, and it is. ~ Kara Tippetts

Cure the symptoms, cure the disease. ~ Michael Critchton

I don't know if God exists and I don't care. God's will and design for this temporal and spatial vastness, if any, is so patently, deliberately impenetrable that I doubt any mortal has a grasp on it. The very inexplicability of sad events like the tsunami, like the AIDS crisis or even like the cancer death of the father of one of my daughter's 2nd-grade classmates last week are, to me, reminders to focus on our obligations to one another, not to the infinite; to honor the creator, if any, by honoring creation itself and hoping that's good enough. ~ Eric Zorn

It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house.
It's really, really true.
A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream. ~ Jenny Downham

Those who say that I am being punished are saying that god can't think of anything more vengeful than cancer for a heavy smoker. ~ Christopher Hitchens

In Canada the cancer death rate is 16% higher than in the U.S. because of rationing of medical care. It takes an eight week wait to get radiation therapy for cancer. ~ Dick Morris

For example, colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Every four minutes someone is diagnosed, and every nine minutes someone dies. ~ Kevin Richardson

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air. ~ Pablo Neruda

So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future. ~ Marion Coutts

You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper." Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. "I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is the belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that. ~ Wendy Wunder

Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of. ~ John Green

In 2008, the national Coping with Cancer project published a study showing that terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. Spending one's final days in an I.C.U. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or "It's O.K." or "I'm sorry" or "I love you."

People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system's expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what's most important to them ~ Atul Gawande

I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament. ~ Christopher Lasch

I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there. ~ Pamela Bone

Sometimes a tragedy must happen to keep a soul on schedule. This is the reason for things that seem to have no reason. This is the reason that we cannot fathom when we are going through it.
Perhaps I will get very sick. 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 McGahan

The soul is not in the body, the body rests in the soul. ~ Sandra Turner

Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday. ~ Jodi Picoult

I heard a lot about the idea of dying "with dignity" while my mother was sick. It was only near her very end that I gave much thought to what this idea meant. I didn't actually feel it was undignified for my mother's body to fail--that was the human condition. Having to help my mother on and off the toilet was difficult, but it was natural. The real indignity, it seemed, was dying where no one cared for you the way your family did, dying where it was hard for your whole family to be with you and where excessive measures might be taken to keep you alive past a moment that called for letting go. I didn't want that for my mother. I wanted her to be able to go home. I didn't want to pretend she wasn't going to die. ~ Meghan O'Rourke

You are so high in the tree.
If you jump
you will live a full life
while falling.
You will get married
to a hummingbird
and raise beautiful part-
hummingbirds.
You will die of cancer
in mid-air.
I will not lie. It will be painful.
You are a brave little boy
or girl. ~ Zachary Schomburg

Don't you believe that Jacob can be healed? some persisted, pressuring
Elizabeth to believe - just believe - and Jacob would be healed. The
underlying message was that Elizabeth's faith was not strong enough to save her son. I remembered then the same kind of statements David and I had heard when he was undergoing cancer treatment, when several well-intentioned people informed David that all he had to do to rid his body of cancer was to believe he was healed. I'd resented the implications then, and I resented them for my daughter now. People die. Good
people like David die too young, and innocent little children die, and the
strongest faith in the world cannot keep anyone on this earth forever. If
only the same Christians professing their faith in healing could clearly
see the flip side of that faith, that earth was not where we ultimately belonged.
If Jacob died, he would be going Home. ~ Mary Potter Kenyon

It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Sleep looked so much like death, he saw. Every night people perished, if but for a moment. ~ Hugh Howey

Yet, tragically, many today still eat at the table of demons, serving their own lustful appetites, and then attempt to come to the Lord's table and feast with the righteous. This leads only to spiritual sickness and death because these deceived ones do not discern the true Bread of God.
These sickly sheep have become so spiritually weak and diseased by sin that they cannot eat strong meat. Instead, the prefer to nibble at the husks of ear-tickling teachings. They gravitate toward lightness and entertainment rather than the genuine Word. Their spiritual appetites have become dull as a result of eating too much junk food. ~ David Wilkerson

... is it the young who pass death to the old, or do the old bequeath it to the young?
― Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra ~ Carlos Fuentes

If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. ~ Thomas Pynchon

When you live with death so close, you come to appreciate life all the more. ~ R.A. Salvatore

There is a way beyond this life and beyond death, the path of liberation. In order to be liberated, you have to enter into the world of advanced meditation. ~ Frederick Lenz

I've worked in the prison system, on death row and maximum security. I did that work for six years. I've worked with some of the most difficult people in our society. Buddhism was accessible and helpful for these individuals. ~ Joan Halifax

What attention would death pay to his pathetic voice? He was powerless without her. ~ Ted Dekker

The closest thing to hell on earth is prison. It's the worst experience I've ever had in my life. Besides death. ~ Duane Chapman

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me. ~ Helen Gurley Brown

Love's over brimming mystery joins death and life. It has filled my cup of pain with joy. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. ~ Jim Valvano

And just for a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, wiht a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. - Sal Paradise ~ Jack Kerouac

Human. Happiness. Death.
Everything becomes one pale
memory in the flow of time.
Spirit - always want the impossible and feel pain.
Memory - an attempt to find entirety in the endless parody
called human life.
Freedom, policy, power, sex, violence, destruction, war.
All extremes of ego are unconscious rebellion against death and loneliness.
When you realize, the meaning is lost.
I just want to believe:
when I die, I will flying like a bird ... or like dream ... ~ Alexandar Tomov

That's all war is - a consuming fever: a period of delirium and insanity, of misery, disappointment, discomfort, anxiety, despair, waste, weariness, boredom, brutality, death; and yet to every man in every war there comes a day worth living for: a day when a lifetime of excitement is packed into a few short hours. ~ Kenneth Roberts

Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best. ~ Woody Allen

We have been accustomed to make this existence worth-while by the belief that there is more than the outward appearance
that we live for a future beyond this life here. For the outward appearance does not seem to make sense. if living is to end in pain, incompleteness, and nothingness, it seems a cruel and futile experience for being who are born to reason, hope, create, and love. man, as a being of sense, wants his life to make sense, and he has found it hard to believe that it does so unless there is more that what he see
unless there is an eternal order and an eternal life behind the uncertain and momentary experience of life-and-death. ~ Alan W. Watts

When the Bible uses the words salvation, Savior, and save, it's speaking of the total work of God in bringing people from a state of death - hopeless separation from God - to a state of everlasting life through the forgiveness of sin, based on the merits of Christ Jesus who died and rose again. Saving us is the greatest and most concrete demonstration of God's love, the definitive display of His grace throughout time and eternity. ~ David Jeremiah

If chick-lit really is taking a commercial battering, I'd suggest it's because the marketing has been done to death. Covering everything in girlie pink and putting chocolate in the title may once have been a clever Pavlovian device but now makes readers feel a bit sick. ~ Jojo Moyes

Mortality is a hard thing to face. 'That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger.' That's as maybe. But that which does kill us, kills us, and ain't that a bitch...How do you make sense of your life? Signal to noise: what's signal? What's noise? ~ Neil Gaiman

As soon as we have found the key of life, it opens the gates of death. ~ Edward Young

Life was like one big marching army. Death ran alongside and picked off a soldier here and there, but that didn't affect the army. Its march continued, and its size didn't seem to diminish. On the contrary, it grew on into eternity, so that no one was alone in death. Someone else would always follow. That was what counted. Such was the chain of life: unbreakable. But ~ Carsten Jensen

There's this thing; it's called 'hate'. It's born to dim shine's brilliance.... then it dies. ~ T.F. Hodge

When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end. ~ John Connolly

I believe creeds aren't worth the paper they are written on...But I still believe in God.
I believe that if you look at my life, you'll only sometimes see what I believe.
I believe that if we have two coats, we should give one away (though I don't do it).
Today I don't believe in anything; tomorrow who knows.
I sometimes believe in God- one who existed before time, beyond gender or fathom.
Maker of heaven and earth and ginger (all good things), whales, two-hundred-foot cliffs, cloud banks, shipwrecks,
And in Jesus Christ, God's only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost- how?
Born of a fourteen-year-old, Mary, scared out of her wits.
Was crucified, dead, and buried, and I used to believe in the penal substitution theory of atonement, but now I just see a violent death and struggle to see how violence can ever be redemptive...
He descended into hell, or was hell all around him all the time?
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into safety of abstraction, away from having to feel this, from dealing with this,
And sits, maybe sprawls, on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
I believe in me; I believe in the Spirit, Sophia, wisdom...
The holy catholic (i.e., everybody) Church;
The Communion of saints; does this mean me?
LOVE
The Forgiveness of sins (but I still feel shame); (don't you?)
The Resurrection of the body.
I believe ~ Peter Rollins

When our friends are alive, we see the good qualities they lack; dead, we remember only those they possessed. ~ Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable. ~ Guillermo Del Toro

Death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast. ~ Bob Dylan

I will love thee to the death,
And out beyond into the dream to come. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

The idea that you're completing someone else in a marriage to me is death. That to me is a false start and most of us are usually taught that ... you've got to stand on your own. Then you can build something extraordinary. ~ Richard Gere

On September 16, in defiance of the cease-fire, Ariel Sharon's army
circled the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, where Fatima and
Falasteen slept defenselessly without Yousef. Israeli soldiers set up
checkpoints, barring the exit of refugees, and allowed their Lebanese
Phalange allies into the camp. Israeli soldiers, perched on rooftops,
watched through their binoculars during the day and at night lit the sky
with flares to guide the path of the Phalange, who went from shelter to
shelter in the refugee camps. Two days later, the first western
journalists entered the camp and bore witness. Robert Fisk wrote of it
in Pity the Nation:
They were everywhere, in the road, the laneways, in the
back yards and broken rooms, beneath crumpled masonry
and across the top of garbage tips. When we had seen a
hundred bodies, we stopped counting. Down every
alleyway, there were corpses - women, young men, babies
and grandparents - lying together in lazy and terrible
profusion where they had been knifed or machine-gunned to
death. Each corridor through the rubble produced more
bodies. The patients at the Palestinian hospital had
disappeared after gunmen ordered the doctors to leave.
Everywhere, we found signs of hastily dug mass graves.
Even while we were there, amid the evidence of such
savagery, we could see the Israelis watching us. From the
top of the tower block to the wes ~ Susan Abulhawa

Heavy misfortunes have befallen us, but let us only cling closer to what remains, and transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live. Our circle will be small, but bound close by the ties of affection and mutual misfortune. And when time shall have softened your despair, new and dear objects of care will be born to replace those of whom we have been so cruelly deprived. ~ Mary Shelley

Our greatest hope does not rest in the death of suffering. Neither does our help lie in us having a full and perfect life, with no pain, no brokenness, and no Lyme disease. Instead our hope lies in God and we hope in the fact that this is our temporary home and our forever home with Him in Heaven is perfect. This hope- this beautiful and living hope (I Peter 1:3-4) is for the future but also gives us hope for our present days. ~ Rebecca VanDeMark

I used to be the youngest person on the set [of Bored To Death]. Now I'm very often the oldest person on the set. I feel lucky about that, to be honest. Lena [Dunham], by the way is a doll to me. So much fun to work with and really open. ~ Richard Masur

Aaron opened his mouth, closed it again, and fixed Nicky with an annoyed look. "You're explaining this to Andrew when he gets back." "Oh, hell no," Nicky said, and jerked a thumb at Neil. "I'mma leave that one to him. Thanks for taking one for the team, Neil. You're a real friend." Nicky grinned over at Neil, but his amusement didn't last. He seemed confused by whatever he saw on Neil's face and backpedaled with, "Don't worry, we'll send Renee along with you for backup. Last I checked Andrew only wins half their fights, so you might actually survive. Uh. Neil?" He should just let it go, or at least leave it to think about later, but Neil couldn't resist. "Are we?" he asked, because hadn't Betsy said it just a few days ago? He hadn't understood it then and hadn't even tried, too angry and upset over everything else that was happening. Tonight it almost meant something, though what, Neil didn't know. Realizing Nicky couldn't follow his twisting train of thought, Neil forced himself to say, "Friends?" It was like that one word punched all the joy out of Nicky, but the look that crossed Nicky's face next was too fast for Neil to decipher. Nicky's smile was back a second later, but it didn't reach his eyes. Neil might have apologized, except Nicky reached out and scrubbed a gloved hand through Neil's hair. "You are going to be the absolute death of me," Nicky said. "Yeah, kid. We're friends. You're stuck with us, like it or not. ~ Nora Sakavic

Nurse your grief, don't spill a drop of it, because it'll help you to reach your zenith, some day. ~ Lara Biyuts

Henry," Robbins said, looking not at him but out to the other side ofthe road, "the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. That protection lasts from here" - and he pointed to an imaginary place in the road - "all the way to the death ofthat property" - and he pointed to a place a few feet from the first place. "But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter ifyou are not much more darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But ifyou roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns round and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you will need. You will have failed in your part ofthe bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter. ~ Edward P. Jones

There are other ways to seek justice. More death isn't the answer. It never is. This isn't you, Ina. The girl I love is passionate, and gentle, and kind ~ Audrey Coulthurst

Such is the blindness, nay the insanity of mankind, that some men are driven to death by the fear of it. ~ Seneca The Younger

Messages are the death of an honest literary transaction with children ~ Maurice Sendak

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast. ~ Andy Andrews

Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Vin shook her head. "Not right now. You said their prayer - is this the religion you believe in, then?" "I believe in them all." Vin frowned. "None of them contradict each other?" Sazed smiled. "Oh, often and frequently they do. But, I respect the truths behind them all - and I believe in the need for each one to be remembered." "Then, how did you decide which religion's prayer to use?" Vin asked. "It just seemed ... appropriate," Sazed said quietly, regarding the scene of shadowed death. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked these for your challenges. They are stones on which you choose to whet the keen edge of your spirit. ~ Richard Bach

It all jibed, and the books would close on Jasper as death by misadventure. Unofficially, Eve labeled it death by stupidity, but there wasn't a place on the sheet for that particular observation. - Lt. Eve Dallas on a drunk fall off the roof ~ J.D. Robb

Yes, but knee pants are so much more flattering. You can see my legs."
You want people to see your legs?"
I have very nice legs!" We both paused to admire them for a moment. ~ Karen Chance

I think that in the space between birth and death you can have one life, or you can have many. But in order to have many, you also need the strength to end the one that came before. And there lies the tricky part. ~ L. H. Cosway