Tumors Quotes

I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul. ~ Lee Atwater

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

The fundamental act of medical care is assumption of responsibility. Surgery has assumed responsibility for disease which is largely acute, local or traumatic. This is responsibility for the entire range of injuries and wounds, local infections, benign and malignant tumors, as well as a large fraction of those pathologic processes and anomalies which are localized in the organs of the body. The study of surgery is a study of these diseases, the conditions and details of their care. ~ Francis Daniels Moore

But I keep thinking love should be like a tree. You look at trees and they've got bumps and scars from tumors, infestations, what have you, but they're still growing. Despite the bumps and bruises, they're--straight. ~ Lorrie Moore

Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying. ~ John Green

I would say, as far as heckling, there's benign and there's malignant; like tumors man. Sometimes you get really nice hecklers. I'd say percentage-wise it's only about 10 to 20 percent the whole year. ~ Godfrey

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life. ~ Roberto Bolano

The great powers have dominated the destiny of the Islamic countries for years and ... installed the Zionist cancerous tumor in the heart of the Islamic world ... Many of the problems facing the Muslim world are due to the existence of the Zionist regime. ~ Ali Khamenei

I'll smoke, I'll cough, I'll get the tumors, I'll die, deal? Thank you America. [salutes] ~ Bill Hicks

Only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. ~ Ricardo Semler

It isn't very serious, I have this tiny little tumor on the brain. ~ J.D. Salinger

I'm in favor of personal growth as long as it doesn't include malignant tumors. ~ George Carlin

Fruit fly scientists, God bless 'em, are the big exceptions. Morgan's team always picked sensibly descriptive names for mutant genes, like 'speck,' 'beaded,' 'rudimentary,' 'white,' and 'abnormal.' And this tradition continues today, as the names of most fruit fly genes eschew jargon and even shade whimsical… The 'turnip' gene makes flies stupid. 'Tudor' leaves males (as with Henry VIII) childless. 'Cleopatra' can kill flies when it interacts with another gene, 'asp.' 'Cheap date' leaves flies exceptionally tipsy after a sip of alcohol… And thankfully, this whimsy with names has inspired the occasional zinger in other areas of genetics… The backronym for the "POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic" gene in mice - 'pokemon' - nearly provoked a lawsuit, since the 'pokemon' gene (now known, sigh, as 'zbtb7') contributes to the spread of cancer, and the lawyers for the Pokemon media empire didn't want their cute little pocket monsters confused with tumors. ~ Sam Kean

The truth thy speech doth show, within my heart reproves the swelling pride.
[It., Lo tuo ver dir m'incuora
Buona umilta e gran tumor m'appiani.] ~ Dante Alighieri

Scene VI (1940)
It is our fault we love only the skull of Beauty
Without knowing who she was, of what she died.
We have the thief's guilt, but not his booty,
The liar's spasm without ever having lied.
The sick locust scrapes his injured song,
His thorax only partially destroyed.
Retching is prohibited. It's wrong.
The murderer feels no hate he can avoid.
Now flies bite worst where the skin is broken.
Illness triumphs. Lesions. Soon tumors sprout.
The bloated plants quiver, the seeds will be shaken.
'Your head's bashed in, darling. Look out. ~ Paul Bowles

I had a brain cancer specialist sit in my living room and tell me that he would never take radiation if he had a brain tumor. And I asked him, 'but, do you send people for radiation?' and he said, of course. 'I'd be drummed out of the hospital if I didn't. ~ Ralph W. Moss

The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public, almost as if they'd printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them out of aeroplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and it's easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your finger. ~ Neal Stephenson

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination. ~ Edward Dahlberg

All his life long he had been amazed at the way ideas have of agglomerating, divorced from feeling, like crystals in strange, meaningless formations; and of growing like tumors, devouring the flesh that conceives them; or of assuming certain human lineaments, but in monstrous wise, like those inert masses to which some women give birth, and which are, after all, only the incoherent dreams of matter. He found that a goodly number of the mind's productions are no more than such deformed mooncalves. Other conceptions, less impure and more precise, forged as if by a master workman, make for illusion when viewed from afar; though commanding our admiration for their parallels and their angles, like intricate iron grills, they are nevertheless only bars behind which the understanding imprisons itself, abstract fetters already eaten into by the rust of false premises. ~ Marguerite Yourcenar

The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river
it's in the pores of the place
but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It's a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches.
This is the kind of place you don't come to unless you've been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It's a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes. ~ Stephen King

Secrets are like the cancer of families. Like tumors, they grow ever larger, and if they are not removed, they suffocate the mind and spirit, and spawn madness. As long as they remain, they cast a shadow on every truth that is uttered, clouding it, constricting it, disporting it. Secrets hurt the secret keeper as much as the poor souls from whom the secret is kept. And even once the secret is out, its shadow echoes into the future, the remnants of its memory leaving us vigilant and fearful. ~ Patricia Falvey

This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?
'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner. ~ John Green

Chaga is one of the weirdest mushrooms you may ever see. A fungal parasite found on birch trees, Chaga is a hardened, blackened, crusty formation that looks like a bursting tumor. ~ Paul Stamets

I had a tumor in my left eye which killed the optic nerve, but it's my real eye. I just cannot see out of it. ~ Sandy Duncan

He conducted interviews with nearly a hundred USDA poultry inspectors from thirty-seven plants. "Every week," he reports, "millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria, or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers." Next ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? Exchanges ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

See what? I didn't see anything. There were no scary people there. Nothing freaky. I'm going home now and tomorrow I'm going to have the doctors check for a brain tumor. Full battery of tests. Whole nine yard. Whatever's wrong with me, we'll find it and deal with it. At this point, my vote is either tumor or space alien testing. Either one works for me. (Geary) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance as a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: "I don't give them time to die", he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. "Fucking undisciplined cells!" he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter. ~ William S. Burroughs

Drugs kill, just like cancer. So don't smoke ... tumors. ~ Bo Burnham

I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb stairs
and clear his throat outside our door. ~ Leonard Cohen

If you want to really understand about a tumor, you've got be be a tumor. ~ June Goodfield

I grew up on Lake Michigan during the PCB explosion, and I remember seeing the sick, dead fish with tumors, the weird deformed seagulls, the scum and the filth floating. We couldn't go swimming. ~ Mark Ruffalo

There should be no more shame in acknowledging (mental illness) than in acknowledging a battle with high blood pressure or the sudden appearance of a malignant tumor. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130) ~ Stephen Batchelor

When you release the wrongdoer from the wrong, you cut a malignant tumor out of your inner life. You set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

Adult stem cells tend not to form tumors. ~ Virginia Foxx

I was actually tone deaf until I had tumors in my ears - I had very small ear canals - removed. Once they fixed that, I was actually able to sing in a pleasant manner. ~ Lauren Worsham

I have hour spurts when I feel fine and I can walk normal and stuff, other hours, I'm wobbling. I feel like there's somebody behind me kicking my legs out from underneath me. The whole tumor symptom thing is crazy. It's unpredictable. It really messes with your life. ~ Lauryn Hill

Min Chiu Li, the researcher who had been expelled from the institute for treating women with placental tumors with methotrexate long after their tumors had visibly disappeared. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Leaving Things Alone (excerpt)

You train your eye and your vision lusts after colour. You train your ear, and you long for delightful sound. You delight in doing good, and your natural kindness is blown out of shape. You delight in righteousness, and you become righteous beyond all reason. You overdo liturgy, and you turn into a ham actor. Overdo your love of music, and you play corn. Love of wisdom leads to wise contriving. Love of knowledge leads to faultfinding.

If men would stay as they really are, taking or leaving these eight delights would make no difference. But if they will not rest in their right state, the eight delights develop like malignant tumors. The world falls into confusion. Since man honour these delights, and lust after them, the world has gone stone-blind.

When the delight is over, they still will not let go of it: they surround its memory with ritual worship, they fall on their knees to talk about it, play music and sing, fast and discipline themselves in honour of the eight delights. When the delights become a religion, how can you control them? ~ Thomas Merton

When your life falls apart, you either grow, or you grow a tumor. ~ Lissa Rankin

Reading Aloud to My Father

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov's first
sentence I knew it wasn't the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness.

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same --
Chopin's Piano Concerto - he asked me
to turn it off. He ceased eating, and drank
little, while the tumors briskly appropriated
what was left of him.

But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That's why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend.

At the end they don't want their hands
to be under the covers, and if you should put
your hand on theirs in a tentative gesture
of solidarity, they'll pull the hand free;
and you must honor that desire,
and let them pull it free. ~ Jane Kenyon

I do, however, struggle to reconcile what medicine has taught me so well with the very reasons that drew me to it in the first place. I want to cry for those in whose bellies I find disseminated tumors, but cannot for fear of being unable to see clearly enough to sew them closed. I want to sit and linger with my patients, but know that such inefficiency would never work in the clinical world. I want to be able to soothe my patients' suffering without the burden of knowing the inexorable future of their diseases. ~ Pauline W. Chen

Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace. ~ Dani Shapiro

The mental thought patterns that cause the most dis-ease in the body are CRITICISM, ANGER, RESENTMENT and GUILT. For instance, criticism indulged in long enought will often lead to dis-eases such as arthritis. Anger turns into things that boil and burn and infect the body. Resentment long held festers and eats away at the self and ultimately can lead to tumors and cancer. Guilt always seeks punishment and leads to pain. ~ Louise L. Hay

When you hit your 40s, you begin to take notice of the effects of aging because people that you know begin to die of heart attacks and tumors, so we take notice of the effects of aging. ~ S. Jay Olshansky

In 2006, the Vogelstein team revealed the first landmark sequencing effort by analyzing thirteen thousand genes in eleven breast and colon cancers. (Although the human genome contains about twenty thousand genes in total, Vogelstein's team initially had tools to assess only thirteen thousand.) In 2008, both Vogelstein's group and the Cancer Genome Atlas consortium extended this effort by sequencing hundreds of genes of several dozen specimens of brain tumors. As of 2009, the genomes of ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, and several forms of leukemia have been sequenced, revealing the full catalog of mutations in each tumor type. Perhaps ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The problem with radio frequency (RF) exposure is not the small amount of brain tumors, is it the large amount of subtle alterations in the brain that lead to attention, confusion, insomnia and fatigue problems. ~ Steven Magee

Water the fruit trees, and don't water the thorns. Be generous to what nurtures the spirit and God's luminous reason-light. Don't honor what causes dysentry and knotted up tumors. ~ Coleman Barks

Is there a tumor in your humor? ~ Robbie Williams

It seems a bit unfair to my relatives to be murdered in order to provide an opportunity for free will for Germans, but even putting that aside, how does free will account for cancer? Is it an opportunity of free will for tumors? ~ Steven Weinberg

I just have an allergic reaction to lung cancer. Gives me tumors. ~ Barry Lyga

Apt words have power to suage the tumors of a troubled mind. ~ John Milton

Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with that desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape. ~ Georges Bernanos

They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn't go any futrther because of the ocean. That's France, that's the French people. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

There isn't a single plant on earth that doesn't carry within it the ability to heal something. For example, the bark from the cinchona tree heals malaria, turkey tail mushrooms (Coriolus versicolor) can shrink tumors, and even those little yellow dandelions that shoot up in every nook and cranny of your lawn can cool down a fever and help detoxify the blood. ~ Mindi K. Counts

I am convinced that by eating biological foods it is possible to avoid a tumor. ~ Gwyneth Paltrow

Some wars," he said dismissively. "What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart is made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner. ~ John Green

I had a tumor. But it was great. ~ David Rakoff

Nothing seems crueler
or more ironic
than these upper crusters who never pay a dime for their high-priced shrinks or reflexology sessions to call those who just want that tumor removed from their uterus a bunch of commies. Well, the revolution is at hand and let's hope all those uninsured commies give the rich such a headache that a whole bottle of Advil won't be enough to take the pain way. ~ Michael Moore

My encounter with desperation while witnessing the death of a precious child changed me, teaching me that although we will have sad times, we can move on, chastened and changed but resilient and hopeful. Laurel showed me one way to live with hope as well as cancer as she thrived even when tumors grew within her small body. She exhibited how a child can push aside despair and appreciate as many moments as possible, to believe in the power of resurrection, both the human spirit and in a Biblical sense. ~ Brent Green

To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors). ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Chemotherapy isn't good for you. So when you feel bad, as I am feeling now, you think, 'Well that is a good thing because it's supposed to be poison. If it's making the tumor feel this queasy, then I'm OK with it.' ~ Christopher Hitchens

In this life, you have to work with people you dislike. You find compromises. But sometimes you find that a person's beliefs are so harmful that you must speak against them. You can't let such harmful statements stand without challenge. They have a tendency to grow into tumors. ~ Libba Bray

This is not science fiction. Around the world, 50,000 men with prostate cancer have been treated with focused ultrasound. Over 22,000 women with uterine fibroids (benign tumors of the uterus) have been treated, thus avoiding hysterectomies and infertility. Clinical trials for tumors of the brain, breast, pancreas and liver, as well as Parkinson's disease, arthritis, and hypertension are inching forward at over 225 research sites around the world. ~ John Grisham

When you give government the power to control the money supply, it grows like a tumor until it extinguishes society itself. ~ Stefan Molyneux

And then we were kissing. My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached up for his neck, and he pulled me up by my waist onto my tiptoes. As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body, this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors. ~ John Green

Taking a biopsy often aggravates and stimulates growth - and does not indicate how many secondary tumors have developed. ~ Charles Horace Mayo

I will forever be grateful to my oncologist for opening the door and saying, 'Damn it, the tumor's 10 percent bigger,' before he even said hello. ~ David Rakoff

I don't get depressed; I grow a tumor instead. ~ Woody Allen