Cancer Survivorsurvivor Quotes

We normally know we're getting older when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded; unless you're a cancer survivor! Then we love people reminding us! ~ Chris Geiger

Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up, Ben; she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She's a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She's a twelve-year-old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because mama had to go to Heaven. She's a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She's all the unsung heroes who couldn't make it but never quit. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

God didn't design your life so you would constantly fall down, but he does hope that you will be brought to your knees. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Seriously," Ben said. "This guy sounds like an alcoholic Kermit the Frog with throat cancer ~ Anonymous

Nah. I'm a tough cookie. Except for the cancer, I'm fine. ~ Lisa Scottoline

My grandmother refused to concede that any member of the family died of natural causes. An uncle's cancer in middle age occurred because all the suitcases fell off the luggage rack onto him when he was in his teens, and so forth. Death was an acquired characteristic. ~ Renata Adler

Given the number of small cancers they did find and the number that they reasoned they had missed...the researchers concluded that virtually everybody would have some evidence of thyroid cancer if examined carefully enough. ~ H. Gilbert Welch

My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer.""What's that?""You have to find out what caused it. ~ Kathy Acker

I don't understand hospital chaplains that try to rob my patients of their anger. Sometimes anger is a key motivator that gets people to take action. Anger can push a cancer patient to jump out of his hospital bed, walk down to the nurses station and scream, "I am getting the hell out of here!". There is a misconception that God is simply sweet and passive. Actually, God can be quite cunning, manipulative and relentless with his children. What we consider as negative traits are actually helpful in molding us. He will use a negative emotion if needed to push people to do things that will change them for the better. He will allow people or situations to derail us if there is a chance that those interactions will push us forward. Personally, I don't want a God that is going to send some church member to my deathbed with a plate of cookies and tell me to have faith. Actually, I rather have a God that screams, "Get the hell off your ass, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Walk down the hall with that Physical Therapist so you can get on with your life!" A little anger in a person can push them to do amazing things. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Farren had discovered before she traveled back to her home in Jersey that Ashley had been diagnosed with stage three stomach cancer and it was pretty aggressive. ~ Nako

Is that cancer curable or just treatable. ~ Tom Brokaw

Women who have been recently diagnosed with breast cancer can learn a tremendous amount from women who have already been treated. ~ Anne Wojcicki

God loves us too much to pretend our sin isn't there. Sin is a cancer and Christ the surgeon. True prayer signs the consent form. ~ Mark Hart

My family and friends were definitely the key to my recovery. One thing that I do suggest is that anyone dealing with a life-threatening illness like cancer choose a point person for people to call to find out how you are doing - a sister, brother, mother, father, daughter, son, or close friend. ~ Olivia Newton-John

As a result of its investigation, the NIH said that to qualify for funding, all proposals for research on human subjects had to be approved by review boards - independent bodies made up of professionals and laypeople of diverse races, classes, and backgrounds - to ensure that they met the NIH's ethics requirements, including detailed informed consent. Scientists said medical research was doomed. In a letter to the editor of Science, one of them warned, When we are prevented from attempting seemingly innocuous studies of cancer behavior in humans ... we may mark 1966 as the year in which all medical progress ceased. ~ Rebecca Skloot

If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don't do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. ~ Steven Pressfield

Unidentified flying objects, abominable snowmen, the Loch Ness monster and human cancer viruses. - Medical World News, 1974, on four "mysteries" widely reported and publicized but never seen ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

Being a breast cancer survivor, as I like to call myself - it will be twenty years next year - I did it to make it possible for women to do regular self breast examinations. It's really important - and, it makes common sense: you know your body better than the doctor does who only sees you once a year, you know? ~ Olivia Newton-John

'Early stages' is when the cancer is completely contained within the prostate. If it is detected when the cancer is entirely in the gland, the chance for full recovery is at its highest. ~ Len Dawson

There's a cancer on the presidency. ~ John Dean

In 1981, after ten years in Basel, I returned to the United States to continue my research on the immune system at the Center for Cancer Research of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Director Salvador E. Luria provided me with an excellent laboratory. ~ Susumu Tonegawa

Though we don't have a cure for cancer we at least have stopped being too ashamed to even say the name of the disease - and the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic is edifying, isn't it? Shame shuts down productive thinking, and I'd like to open the doors. It's a first step. ~ Laura Mullen

For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities. ~ Lance Armstrong

No, she didn't want to find a cure for cancer or make the world a better place for an endangered owl species. She just wanted to be pretty. ~ Devan Sipher

Take away the things that make you panic and you won't panic. 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. Solomon ~ John Corey Whaley

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. ~ Audre Lorde

I'm one of those people who other people like but never remember. I think most of the world is probably like me. Until recently nothing about me was outstanding, and then my mother got cancer. It's a disease people like to talk about, so I'm more popular now. And when I flip through magazines, I read the breast cancer articles first, even before the numerology column. ~ Jill A. Davis

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

When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity. They take down all the struts and buttresses that hold them together and quietly devour their component parts. The process is known as apoptosis or programmed cell death. Every day billions of your cells die for your benefit and billions of others clean up the mess. Cells can also die violently- for instance, when infected- but mostly they die because they are told to. Indeed, if not told to live- if not given some kind of active instruction from another cell- cells automatically kill themselves. Cells need a lot of reassurance.

When, as occasionally happens, a cell fails to expire in the prescribed manner, but rather begins to divide and proliferate wildly, we call the result cancer. Cancer cells are really just confused cells. Cells make this mistake fairly regularly, but the body has elaborate mechanisms for dealing with it. It is only very rarely that the process spirals out of control. On average, humans suffer one fatal malignancy for each 100 million billion cell divisions. Cancer is bad luck in every possible sense of the term. ~ Bill Bryson

Mental imbalance is about as acceptable as herpes. It's never going to be accepted. But really, it's a disease just like cancer. It just happens, and eats away all the good parts of your brain, like judgment and happiness and perception and memory and life. And you can die from depression just like any other disease. And it's not as if people choose it. So why is it still a joke of medicine? "She died of cancer." is a lot more socially acceptable to people than "She committed suicide. ~ Sarahbeth Purcell

It's a fact that children with cancer have higher cure rates than adults with cancer, and I wonder if the reason is their natural, unthinking bravery ... Adults know too much about failure; they're more cynical and resigned and fearful. ~ Lance Armstrong

Precision medicine is diving into the DNA with a knowledge that everybody's tumor has a unique genetic profile and you want to be able to identify that specific piece of DNA that has become mutated and that is driving cancer growth. ~ Laurie Glimcher

At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife's barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, "It was enough to have been a unicorn." What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn't have to be just another goat or horse. ~ Mark Vonnegut

Possibilities are like cancer. The more I think about them, the more they multiply, and there's no way to stop them. I'm out of control. ~ Haruki Murakami

When I was a young woman with four children, I was always living ahead of myself," she said. "Everything I was doing was projected toward the future, and I was so busy, busy, busy, preparing for tomorrow, for the next week, for the next month. Then one day, it all changed. At thirty-eight years old, I found I had breast cancer. I can remember asking my doctor what I should plan for in my future. He said, 'Diane, my advice to you is to live each day as richly as you can.' As I lay in my bed after he left, I thought, will I be alive next year to take my son to first grade? Will I see my children marry? And will I know the joy of holding my grandchildren?" She looked out over the water, barefoot, her legs outstretched; a white visor held down her short, black hair. "For the first time in my life, I started to be fully present in the day I was living. I was alive. My goals were no longer long-range plans, they were daily goals, much more meaningful to me because at the end of each day, I could evaluate what I had done. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

So Dad was cured?" I don't know why I feel so disappointed. I didn't even remember him; he died of cancer when I was one.
"He was." A muscle twitches in my mom's jaw. "But there were times I felt ... There were times it seemed as though he could still feel it, just for a second. Maybe I only imagined it. It doesn't matter. I loved him anyway. He was very good to me."
reminds me that she is not just my mother, but a woman who has fought her whole life for something she has never truly experienced.
My dad was cured. And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.
It makes me ache for her, a feeling I hate and am somehow ashamed of. ~ Lauren Oliver

I have six sisters and two beautiful daughters - that's eight women who mean the world to me. I support the Entertainment Industry Foundation and Lee National Denim Day because they fund programs that are making huge strides in breast cancer research and support. ~ Felicity Huffman

Depression is a treatable medical illness like cancer and heart disease. ~ Judith Peacock

In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:
"There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and - no time to think - out you go.
"You descend. You hit the ground ... But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to? ... No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't?
"The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee