Cancer Quotes

An abundance of peer-reviewed science is showing that a whole foods, plant-based diet prevents most heart attacks, strokes, and even many kinds of cancer. It gets you to your ideal weight easily and sustainably, reverses Type 2 diabetes, and even fixes erectile dysfunction (because it greatly improves circulation!). ~ Kathy Freston

Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time. ~ David R. Brower

I'd say that what I do is like a crack in the mirror. If you go back over the books from Carrie on up, what you see is an observation of ordinary middle-class American life as it's lived at the time that particular book was written. In every life you get to a point where you have to deal with something that's inexplicable to you, whether it's the doctor saying you have cancer or a prank phone call. So whether you talk about ghosts or vampires or Nazi war criminals living down the block, we're still talking about the same thing, which is an intrusion of the extraordinary into ordinary life and how we deal with it. What that shows about our character and our interactions with others and the society we live in interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts. ~ Stephen King

Dad's voice falters as he says goodbye. He is choking down his own grief to protect Mum, I know. He loves her deeply. I accept that he is incapable of expressing all this, and I am incapable of even saying the right thing, should he ever do so. And lurking deeper, is the knowledge that he has been here, himself. When I was aged about 5, his father - my grandfather - had cancer and took his own life by walking into the sea. My dad found his body under a jetty. What would it have been like to experience that tragedy? And then, to try and live, to go on raising a family, with those images haunting you? ~ Linda Collins

Turning 30 was when my parents both got cancer and were fighting it and beat it, but their mortality started to get to me. Everything wasn't as hunky-dory like it was. ~ Darren Aronofsky

I'd hate to see you get cancer, but that's your problem, not mine. ~ Steve Lonegan

The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw. ~ David Sedaris

The home phone is relatively cheap, incredibly reliable, and - if you buy the right phone - will work for years without replacement. Oh, and far as I can tell, a home phone won't give you brain cancer. In a perfect world, the hard line should have become a platform for building out an entire app ecosystem for the home. And yet ... it didn't. ~ John Battelle

My relationship to the desecration of the earth was very theoretical and intellectual until I got sick. I could never watch anything about polar bears dying or the death of bees. There were certain things I knew I couldn't go near because they were too devastating. But I don't think until I got cancer did I get it in my body, what was happening to the earth. I finally went: "Oh! Earth! Organism!" ~ Eve Ensler

I don't want to die until I see cancer cured. ~ James D. Watson

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that's feminism. ~ Bell Hooks

Enoki mushrooms, a tasty variety commonly sold in grocery stores, were one of the first mushrooms studied for preventing cancer. ~ Paul Stamets

I was very surprised when last I bought a packet of cigarettes and had to request a refund as I read a warning that told me "smoking can cause fatal lung cancer". ~ Robert Clark

In the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with after a contentious meeting ~ Will Schwalbe

But the doctors in the past, as the review of the evidence showed, branded Jenner, Semmelweis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Pasteur, Lister, Koch and Keen as charlatans ... Napoleon said that war is too important to be left to the generals. We go on the assumption in the Senate that foreign relations are too important to be left to the diplomats ... this question (on a novel cancer cure) is too important to leave purely to doctors ... ~ Paul Douglas

They threaten me with lung cancer, and still I smoke and smoke. If they'd only threaten me with hard work, I might stop. ~ Mignon McLaughlin

He gave me a look that would have made cancer apologize, then ran like hell. ~ David Wong

I think you would have to be a nihilist to say that we are not making progress on cancer, just like you'd have to be hubristically optimistic to say that we have conquered cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

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

God, who knows me by name, [is] right next to me. ~ Shirley Corder

I'm in a win-win playoff. Response of a Christian dying of cancer at thirty on the prospect of miraculous healing. ~ Billy Graham

And then he spent three years wondering why everyone found that so hard to understand. All he was doing was living instead of dying. Some people get cancer. Some people get crazy. Nobody tries to take the chemo away. ~ John Corey Whaley

As I travel the country for away games, I meet kids fighting cancer in almost every city. They visit the ballpark, and I invite them onto the field so we can chat and then watch the game. ~ Jon Lester

Can you tell me what happened, Libbs? Can you tell me what has you so panicked?"

"All of it." That was my answer, even though I knew my dad was expecting something more specific. "Everything. It was you. Me. Aneurysms. Death. Cancer. Murder. Crime. Mean people. Rotten people. Two-faced people. Bullies. Natural disasters. The world has me panicked. The world did this. Especially the way it gives you people to love and then takes them away." But the answer was actually simple. I had decided to be afraid. ~ Jennifer Niven

There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say. ~ Charles Hazlewood

Whatever the rationale, the suppression of unorthodox cancer therapies and the sustained persecution of their proponents by government and colleagues runs counter to freedom of thought, much less freedom of choice. ~ Marilyn Ferguson

Here was a woman, having a child by accident that she surely would come to love. As for me, through the accident of cancer i'd be leaving three children to grow up without my love ~ Randy Pausch

I'm cancer-free today!
Cancer cannot keep up with my goals, enthusiasm, focus, passion, and determination. I will run you out of my body by not thinking about you, I will focus on what it will be like when you are gone. ~ Gregory Q. Cheek

The secret to battling cancer, then, is to find means to prevent these mutations from occurring in susceptible cells, or to find means to eliminate the mutated cells without compromising normal growth. The conciseness of that statement belies the enormity of the task. Malignant growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraiding the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced by our species. Cancer is built into our genomes: the genes that unmoor normal cell division are not foreign to our bodies, but rather mutated, distorted versions of the very genes that perform vital cellular functions. And cancer is imprinted in our society: as we extend our life span as a species, we inevitably unleash malignant growth (mutations in cancer genes accumulate with aging; cancer is thus intrinsically related to age). If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer.
Glen had been born on the day after Christmas.
"My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that's all," he explained.
But we knew this was a lie. Glen's parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers. ~ Augusten Burroughs

I'm cycling to take cancer message worldwide. ~ Lance Armstrong

We have to overthrow the idea that it's a diversion from 'real' work when scientists conduct high-quality research in the open. Publicly funded science should be open science. Improving the way that science is done means speeding us along in curing cancer, solving the problem of climate change and launching humanity permanently into space. ~ Michael Nielsen

I am committing suicide by cigarette, I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn't. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I guess most of us would rather not discuss cancer because we are all afraid we might be told we have it. It's hard for people to even say the word, and that's the first obstacle you have to overcome when you are diagnosed with the disease. I think once you understand a little more about it ... I don't mean it gets any easier ... but I think you give it more in-depth thought about how you're going to deal with it. ~ Arnold Palmer

I took on cancer like I take on everything - like a mission and a job to accomplish. ~ Sam Taylor-Johnson

Love is about giving, about caring for the other person's welfare. Love is treating someone, in the Kantian sense, never as a means but as an end in themselves. Love is sacrifice, love is something you work at, something you build like a house or tend like a plant, brick by brick, drop by drop, day by day. Nonsense. Old wives' tales, old husbands' tales. That is affection they are talking about, that is companionship, that is charity, that is tickets for the Cancer Research Ball. You must ask the young if you want to know what love is. Only they are deep enough in it to describe. We older ones have clues and simulacra, we base our judgement, like pathologists do, on the dents and scars and sediments of hearts long kept in formaldehyde. It is the pulsing heart you want to probe: the pulsing, beating, leaping, dipping, fluttering heart of a seventeen-year-old. ~ A.P.

I received some really bad news. I'm not okay."
A bolt of terror slashed through me. She had some sort of disease, I could tell. She had cancer. I was sure of it. I had a vision of Carol Kingsly in her hospital bed, her limbs withered, her head shaved, looking up at me with sunken eyes. Gad. Looking up at me with the expectation that I would care for her. Me. Somehow now she was my responsibility? We had only been going out for a couple of weeks, I didn't even like her all that much, and still I was on the hook? What were the rules on that? And with whom could I lodge my appeal? ~ William Lashner

So what do they do? They start writing articles in the New York Daily News. Boy, that's a paper that loves to write crap on people, isn't it? Wanna talk about a paper that supports fascism! Man, I've seen more doctors hatcheted in there. The butchery they did on Emmanuel Revici, the butchery they did on Lawrence Burton, calling him nothing more
what was the quote the guy said? ... "Burton is nothing more than a horse doctor." Denigrating him, tearing down his character. ~ Gary Null

There had been a head of the FDA (who later turned out to be a fraud) his name was Fishbein and he was rampantly opposed to any alternative therapy. He went after Hoxsey, the Hoxsey therapy back in the 1940's and 50's, and destroyed Hoxsey. But not before Hoxsey sued the AMA and Fishbein and [proved] that the therapy actually worked. But it didn't help him because they closed him down anyhow ~ Gary Null

And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia. ~ Sherman Alexie

LUNG CANCER is linked to cigarette smoking - but L&M still plug their cigarettes as "just what the doctor ordered. ~ Tony Bacon

Reducing the price of cancer drugs is a humanitarian move. ~ Yusuf Hamied

My mother did not want cancer to interfere with my life, as she knew it would eventually end hers. ~ Jenna Morasca

Maybe I should mention it: I was not from the beginning mainly interested in papilloma virus; I was mainly interested in infectious agents in human cancer. So papilloma viruses came up as the most likely candidate from my viewpoint. ~ Harald Zur Hausen

Food has become a cause of disease rather than a guardian of health in the modern world. Once regarded as the central pillar of life and the most effective of all medicines, food is now a major contributing factor in cancer, heart disease, arthritis , mental illness, and many other pathological conditions. Virtually monopolized by agricultural and industrial cartels, public food supplies, are processed and packaged to produce profits and prolong shelf life, not to promote health and prolong human life. It seems incredible that public health authorities permit the unrestricted use of hydrogenated vegetable oils, refined sugar, chemical preservatives, toxic pesticides, and over 5,000 other artificial food additives that have repeatedly been proven to cause cancer, impair immunity, and otherwise erode human health, while restricting the medical use of nutrients, herbs, acupuncture, fasting, and other traditional therapies that have been shown to prevent and cure the very diseases caused by chemical contaminants in food and water. ~ Daniel Reid

Hope was a cancer inside him. He didn't want it; he did not want it. He could not bear these shoots of tender green hope springing up within him any longer. (45) ~ Elizabeth Strout

Cancer came back into my life twice in order for me to understand something, and I guess I still wasn't getting it. And my husband wasn't getting it, either. ~ Mariel Hemingway

With over 3 million women battling breast cancer today, everywhere you turn there is a mother, daughter, sister, or friend who has been affected by breast cancer. ~ Betsey Johnson

Breast cancer isn't one disease - it's probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can't optimize treatment for them. ~ Leroy Hood

I just effectively fight the illness, regardless if it's cancer or religion. ~ Adam Darski

Do not be blind in love and try not to suffer in silence. -Alba Castillo ~ Alba Castillo

But when I first got cancer, after the initial shock and the fear and paranoia and crying and all that goes with cancer - that word means to most people ultimate death - I decided to see what I could do to take that negative and use it in a positive way. ~ Herbie Mann

One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call 'the thing itself'. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea. ~ C.S. Lewis

My belief is that cancer comes from inside you and so much of it has to do with the environment of your body. It's the stress that will turn that gene on or not. ~ Melissa Etheridge

Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. ~ Henry Miller

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure. ~ Agent Smith

We live in the irradiated lazy indoor cancer society. ~ Steven Magee

Above all, cancer is a spiritual practice that teaches me about faith and resilience. ~ Kris Carr

When you first get into television it is a big deal, then you realize you are no better than anyone else, we just have a platform to use, to help other people. I use that platform for the work I do in the military, the work I do with cancer because I was fortunate enough to get that platform. ~ Robert Irvine

In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer. In the United States, one in three women and one in two men will develop cancer during their lifetime. A quarter of all American deaths, and about 15 percent of all deaths worldwide, will be attributed to cancer. In some nations, cancer will surpass heart disease to become the most common cause of death. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

And within the computer's innards, a spreading cancer. A self-replicating corruption. A B-pop mutiny of bass and drum and oscillating frequency. Inane quasi poetry glorifying a pointless act of intimacy. ~ Jay Kristoff

Dying from an aggressive fatal brain tumor is like dying from Alzheimer's disease accelerated one hundred times. ~ Steven Magee

I didn't believe when I was first told that I have cancer. I thought, 'How can a young person like me get cancer?' I thought it could never happen to me. It took me a while to realise that I was diagnosed with cancer. ~ Yuvraj Singh

Those who say that climate change doesn't exist are being understood as the flat-earthers that they are, as the people who deny the link between smoking and cancer, as the people who denied the link between HIV and AIDS. ~ Nicholas Stern

health risks of diets loaded with red meat, such as hamburger and steak, and processed meats, such as hot dogs, bacon, and cold cuts. They found that over a ten-year period, men who ate the equivalent of a quarter-pounder hamburger a day had a 22 percent higher risk of dying from cancer and a 27 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease than those men whose diet did not contain such red meat. With women, it was even more impressive. Women who ate large amounts of red meat had a 20 percent higher risk of dying from cancer and a 50 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease. ~ Richard Furman

The most formidable enemy we face is far more destructive and even more successful than any acts of terrorism - liberalism, which has become a cancer to America and to western civilization at large. Over the past one hundred years, liberalism has done more damage to the American cause of Liberty and our prosperity than any attack by any group in any war ever could have hoped for. ~ Daniel Rundquist

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma. ~ Jeff Merkley

It turns out that the very genes that turn on in cancer cells perform vital functions in normal cells. In other words, the very genes that allow our embryos to grow or our brains to grow, our bodies to grow, if you mutate them, if you distort them, then you unleash cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

It's my firm intention to whop cancer into submission and I truly believe I've given myself the best start possible by radically overhauling my diet and by staying true to my motto, which is: Don't worry, be happy, feel good. The first thing I did when I was diagnosed was to turn vegan. ~ Larry Hagman

But there are still plenty of people who will tell you that the most evil thing about Karl Marx was what he said about religion. He said it was the opium of the lower classes, as though he thought religion was bad for people, and he wanted to get rid of it. But when Marx said that, back in the 1840s, his use of the word "opium" wasn't simply metaphorical. Back then real opium was the only painkiller available, for toothaches or cancer of the throat, or whatever. He himself had used it. As a sincere friend of the downtrodden, he was saying he was glad they had something which could ease their pain at least a little bit, which was religion. He liked religion for doing that, and certainly didn't want to abolish it. OK? He might have said today as I say tonight, "Religion can be Tylenol for a lot of unhappy people, and I'm so glad it works. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I don't inhale because it gives you cancer, but I look so incredibly handsome with a cigarette that I can't not hold one. ~ Woody Allen

These preliminary studies then prompted hundreds of millions of dollars of studies that failed to confirm the initial hypothesis that fat or animal fat led to cancer. ~ Gary Taubes

Instead of a bucket list Someday Challenge™ wants you to create your Someday Slate™, a list of the things that you have promised yourself to do, things that you planned to do someday! Completing your Someday Slate™ will get you started on finally living your passion now. ~ David A. Koop

A kid zooms past us with a basketball, his mother sprinting after him. The city. Full and buzzy and unaware that somewhere, fifteen blocks south, tiny cells are multiplying in a plot to destroy the whole world. ~ Rebecca Serle

I knew I heard the doctor correctly. I didn't think he said something else, I didn't think for a second, 'Well maybe he didn't say it.' No, I knew I heard him! But I still couldn't comprehend ... in my mind ... in my soul ... he just said, 'cancer.' ~ Stuart Scott

Religion is based on the insistence that over and above all is a purpose and a guiding hand that is beneficent and kind, and would not leave a hair unnumbered or let a sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground. Those who cherish such hallucinations forget that the all-loving power is inflicting tuberculosis, cancer, famine, and pestilence on the trusting, simple sons of men. ~ Clarence Darrow

All science is a two-edged sword. It is pure only in the mind, at conception, as an idea, an equation, or just some new way of looking at things. But once it's out there in the world, it becomes whatever the world wants it to be. Germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, or a cure for cancer. ~ David Ambrose

When women act on behalf of our own sexual desires, we get blamed for being raped, for the demise of modern masculinity, for men's cheating, for getting cervical cancer, for street harassment, even for earthquakes. ~ Jaclyn Friedman

While dealing with my father's cancer,I grew up a hundred years in one day and died a thousand deaths every night. ~ Nighat Hafiz

Cancer is a very sad thing, but you can always take something from every experience. ~ Pierce Brosnan

'Warning: Smoking may cause fetal injury or premature birth.' ... Found MY brand! Just don't get the ones that say 'lung cancer.' ~ Bill Hicks

Throughout the book, she refers to herself as "the side effect," which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible. ~ John Green

You have in the U.S. around two million new diagnoses of cancer a year, and 13 million survivors, so you have about 10,000 patients that require analysis every day. That's about five petabytes that need to be transmitted and computed on a daily basis. ~ Patrick Soon-Shiong

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 ~ Jane Kenyon

Breast cancer change you, and the change can be beautiful. ~ Alyssa-Jane Cook

Who needs toothpaste when you have cigarettes? ~ Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff

I've lost seven friends to smoking-related lung cancer. Each death was a long, agonizing experience. ~ Tom Brokaw

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath - our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us. ~ Wayne Muller

Discouragement is the cancer of great things. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The log officer handed me a pair of examination gloves. Pink. Everyone else wore red or black.
"Thanks." I glanced at her name tag. "Officer Kennedy."
"You're welcome. They support breast cancer awareness."
I snapped on the gloves. "I knew that. I'm always willing to do my part to keep breasts safe."
"We appreciate that, sir. ~ Greg Mongrain

For years I heeded the warning: Do monthly breast self-exams. Like most women, I did them on a 'sort of' basis. Every few months I'd sort of do a quick feel, but never as thoroughly as the doctors urged. I didn't want to go looking for trouble. If you look for it, you might find it. Looking for cancer is unsettling. Thank God I looked. ~ Regina Brett

The hardest thing you can do is smile when you are ill, in pain, or depressed. But this no-cost remedy is a necessary first half-step if you are to start on the road to recovery. ~ Allen Klein

But civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish, and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs, and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way that the latter are our internal organs. If then, we can no more live without the things outside than without those inside, the plain inference is that the words "I" and "myself " must include both sides. The sun, the earth, and the forests are just as much features of your own body as your brain. Erosion of the soil is as much a personal disease as leprosy, and many "growing communities" are as disastrous as cancer. ~ Alan W. Watts

My cancer continues to make for all kind of hilarity. ~ Scott Thompson

American children are the heaviest worldwide, and they are getting heavier at a faster rate than other children around the globe. This spread of obesity foreshadows an explosion in degenerative diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer waiting to erupt in our children's future. Together we can stop this tragedy from ever happening. ~ Joel Fuhrman

Quentin flicked a quick glance back at her again. Poppy. This girl had the wrong name. She should have been Rose. Great face, lots of prickles. ~ Ros Baxter

linguist called Alla who advised us, among other things, to treat our more stupid students with sympathy, "as if they had cancer." While ~ Elif Batuman

I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Suddenly I had to spend all my time getting well. ~ Gilda Radner

I don't think tongue cancer is the best cancer for an actor. ~ Michael Douglas

It used to be controversial whether smoking caused lung cancer, it used to be controversial whether HIV caused AIDS. Now, there are a few mavericks who deny those things. In the case of climate change, I think the debate is going the same way in that there is a strong consensus that it is a serious matter. ~ Martin Rees