Unwell Quotes

Those of us who have the luck to enjoy good health forget about this vast parallel universe of the unwell-their daily miseries, their banal ordeals. Only when you cross that frontier into the world of ill-health do you recognize its quiet, massive presence, its brooding permanence. ~ William Boyd

You have no idea how grief will take you. The same with severe illness, motherhood, any profound experience. You don't know yourself. Others don't know you. These events show who you are. And you'll be surprised, shocked even. You'll feel the way you feel when you've done a particularly offensive-smelling shit – That couldn't possibly have come out of me – and start to rationalize it – Must be that bag of pistachios I ate earlier, or perhaps I am unwell. You can't believe you could do something so foul and unrecognizable. Something so outside yourself. ~ Viv Albertine

No one ever expects a man missing his limbs to perform the same as a whole person in normal society. Why do we expect the mentally unwell to perform equally to those without the handicap? ~ Aaron Daniel Behr

Trashy people puke," Tilly said. "Ladies are unwell. ~ James S.A. Corey

Sometimes, dear brother, I know so well what I want. I am quite able to do without God, both in my life and in my painting, but what I cannot do without, unwell as I am, is something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

Are you unwell? You aren't going to vomit on me, are you?"

"That wasn't on my list of planned activities for the afternoon, no, but if you really insist, I suppose I could try for a hairball or something. ~ Katie MacAlister

When you're feeling unwell, remember that the same power that actually made your body knows how to restore it to its original state of well-being. All you have to do is remove the obstacles erected by you and your toxic world, and allow this healing power to flow through you. ~ Wayne Dyer

The last time I'd been unwell, suicidally depressed, whatever you want to call it, the reactions of my friends and family had fallen into several different camps:
The Let's Laugh It Off merchants: Claire was the leading light. They hoped that joking about my state of mind would reduce it to a manageable size. Most likely to say, 'Feeling any mad urges to fling yourself into the sea?'
The Depression Deniers: they were the ones who took the position that since there was no such thing as depression, nothing could be wrong with me. Once upon a time I'd have belonged in that category myself. A subset of the Deniers was The Tough Love people. Most likely to say, 'What have you got to be depressed about?'
The It's All About Me bunch: they were the ones who wailed that I couldn't kill myself because they'd miss me so much. More often than not, I'd end up comforting them. My sister Anna and her boyfriend, Angelo, flew three thousand miles from New York just so I could dry their tears. Most likely to say, 'Have you any idea how many people love you?'
The Runaways: lots and lots of people just stopped ringing me. Most of them I didn't care about, but one or two were important to me. Their absence was down to fear; they were terrified that whatever I had, it was catching. Most likely to say, 'I feel so helpless … God, is that the time?' Bronagh – though it hurt me too much at the time to really acknowledge it – was the number one offender.
The Woo-Woo crew: i.e. ~ Marian Keyes

You hear a lot about the benefits of insanity or whatever - like, Dr. Karen Singh had once told me this Edgar Allan Poe quote: "The question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence." I guess she was trying to make me feel better, but I find mental disorders to be vastly overrated. Madness, in my admittedly limited experience, is accompanied by no superpowers; being mentally unwell doesn't make you loftily intelligent any more than having the flu does. ~ John Green

I simply couldn't conceive of how devastating it would be not to be able to hear my children's voices. Not to be able to communicate with them, to hear them learn, grow, and express themselves verbally. How fortunate, how blessed I am. This overwhelmed me. I can talk to my children, I can respond to their needs and comfort them when they tell me they are unwell. I can tell them stories and hear them tell theirs. ~ Kate Winslet

We have to wonder what this might suggest about the relationship between the public realm and private lives in our settlement.
Some have proposed that we need to do more in encouraging individual interests and pursuits, even if they don't appear terribly useful or practical, to bolster and deepen those inner reserves that "make" a person into who she is, and how, by extension, she identifies and values herself. Other, more conservative, voices balk at this, countering that we need, in fact, to strengthen the bonds of the commune, so that to end one's own life would be tantamount to a grievous assault on us all ... But if we calm ourselves and open our eyes and step back far enough, we have to admit that our society, if not fundamentally unwell, has been profoundly wounded. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell. ~ Renata Adler

There grew between him and Ella a conspiracy of experience, as if the raising of children, the industry of supporting each other in ways practical and tender, and the sum of years and then decades of private conversations and small intimacies - the odour of each other on waking; the trembling sound of each other's breathing when a child was unwell; the illnesses, the griefs and cares, the tendernesses, unexpected and unbidden - as if all this were somehow more binding, more important and more undeniable than love, whatever love was. ~ Richard Flanagan

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs. ~ David Almond

I think that, very often there's a pain that's just too painful to touch. You'll break apart. And I think her mother's death and disappearance and abandonment was something she just never could deal with. Eleanor Roosevelt, when she's really very unwell in 1936, she takes to her bed. She has a mysterious flu. ~ Blanche Wiesen Cook

If family or friends are unwell or ill - it's perhaps the only thing that really can make one feel vulnerable. ~ Richard Branson

Po's been sick, you know." "I'm sorry to hear that," he said, with no expression. "Don't be an ass. He's actually been quite unwell. ~ Kristin Cashore

They can be hard for their families to understand, those returned, used-up miracle children. They sound like liars to people who never had a doorway of their own. They sound like dreamers. They sound... unwell, to the charitable, and simply sick to the cruel. ~ Seanan McGuire

I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell; I know right now you can't tell; But stay a while and maybe then you'll see; A different side of me ~ Rob Thomas

Horatia put a gloved hand on his arm. He didn't even seem to notice. "Charles, are you unwell?"
He tensed. "No, I'm well enough. There's much to give me worry these days. Don't fret on my behalf."
She stared at him for a long moment, wondering if she ought to inquire further as to the nature of his distress. Charles was always close-lipped when it came to such things. Her brother always claimed Charles couldn't keep a secret, but Horatia knew better. When it came to matters of the heart, the Earl of Lonsdale could remain silent forever. She turned her attention to the streets again.

-Horatia & Charles. His Wicked Seduction ~ Lauren Smith

The Marquis de Palancy, his head turned sideways on his craning neck, his great round eye glued to the glass of his monocle, moved slowly around in the transparent gloom and appeared no more to see the public in the stalls than a fish that drifts by, unaware of the crowd of curious visitors, behind the glass wall of an aquarium. Occasionally he paused, venerable, wheezy and moss-covered, and the onlooker could not have told whether he was unwell, asleep, swimming, spawning or simply taking breath. ~ Marcel Proust

At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry's tiny head as he slept in the nursery before I left. I thought of every detail and afterwards I felt better. Hellfire and brimstone have never appealed to me and I admit I become easily confused thinking of right and wrong. But I do understand kindness. ~ Sara Sheridan

Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I'm a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out. ~ Andrea Camilleri

When you are well, your own body is a sealed country into which you need not explore far, but when you are unwell, there is no denying that you are made up of organs and fluids and chemistry and that the mechanisms by which your body operates are not invincible. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The Khanum?" Arland coughed. The last sip of tea must've gone wrong.
"Are you unwell?" Dagorkun inquired.
"Healthy as a krahr," Arland said.
"That's such a relief. I would hate for some illness to interfere and spoil the grand celebration I planned when I send you to your afterlife. ~ Ilona Andrews

Many people who live with animals have noticed that their cat or dog becomes solicitous of them when they are feeling unwell. A cat who is normally aloof may come sit in the sick person's lap; a normally rambunctious dog may tone himself down when his human friend isn't up to romping or running. In some cases, the ability of animals to sense illness in a human has been lifesaving. ~ Linda Bender

For years I'd been awaiting that overriding urge I'd always heard about, the narcotic pining that draws childless women ineluctably to strangers' strollers in parks. I wanted to be drowned by the hormonal imperative, to wake one day and throw my arms around your neck, reach down for you, and pray that while that black flower bloomed behind my eyes you had just left me with child. (With child: There's a lovely warm sound to that expression, an archaic but tender acknowledgement that for nine months you have company wherever you go. Pregnant, by contrast, is heavy and bulging and always sounds to my ear like bad news: "I'm pregnant." I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother's deepest fear.) (27) ~ Lionel Shriver

This is the very reason that some lives end seemingly early and by their own hands because Mother Nature doesn't understand that a personage can out-age a body. It is the reason that someone unwell can look so very vibrant on the outside, giving no indication that death lurks around the corner. Souls saturated in sickness, negativity, and ill-thoughts cannot weather the years well. ~ Jess Neal Woods

A man walks into a hospital feeling unwell and the doctor says: "Sorry, you've only got three minutes to live." The man said: "Can you do something for me?" "Yes," he said. "I'll boil you an egg." ~ Frank Carson

A positive attitude eventually begets positive experiences. Choose to be happy. Decide you are well or happy instead of unwell or unhappy, and your experience of living will begin to shift. The mind is the one thing in this world we are able to control, so let's control it! ~ James K. Papp

The Railway Man was a particularly intense and immersive experience. I definitely got carried away. I lost about 35 pounds. I really was incredibly skinny and also quite unwell while we were filming. It wasn't very healthy. I don't recommend it. But then also doing the torture scenes, the water boarding stuff, there wasn't really any other way just to do it really. ~ Jeremy Irvine

If you are unwell, don't ask to be healed, instead ask to be restored to that perfection from which you emanated. ~ Wayne Dyer

We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell. ~ Bruce Robinson

The social custom of calling on people when they are unwell has always mystified me. By definition, you're not feeling or looking your best. Why on earth do people assume you might want visitors? ~ Mary Louise Kelly

I always say that the stand-up world is the arena of the unwell, and it is. ~ Johnny Vegas

My queen? You have a strange look in your eyes. Are you unwell?
I was just ... remembering. ~ George R R Martin

Women come in many colours - black, white, brown, yellow, red when hot, blue when cold, green when sick, multicoloured when unwell and orange when on a night out. In some countries they even come in invisible. ~ Una Mullally

Mary, often a little unwell, and always thinking a great deal of her own complaints, ~ Jane Austen

Last month, on a very windy day, I was returning from a lecture I had given to a group in Fort Washington. I was beginning to feel unwell. I was feeling increasing spasms in my legs and back and became anxious as I anticipated a difficult ride back to my office. Making matters worse, I knew I had to travel two of the most treacherous high-speed roads near Philadelphia – the four-lane Schuylkill Expressway and the six-lane Blue Route.

You've been in my van, so you know how it's been outfitted with everything I need to drive. But you probably don't realize that I often drive more slowly than other people. That's because I have difficulty with body control. I'm especially careful on windy days when the van can be buffeted by sudden gusts. And if I'm having problems with spasms or high blood pressure, I stay way over in the right hand lane and drive well below the speed limit.

When I'm driving slowly, people behind me tend to get impatient. They speed up to my car, blow their horns, drive by, stare at me angrily, and show me how long their fingers can get. (I don't understand why some people are so proud of the length of their fingers, but there are many things I don't understand.) Those angry drivers add stress to what already is a stressful experience of driving.

On this particular day, I was driving by myself. At first, I drove slowly along back roads. Whenever someone approached, I pulled over and let them pass. But as I neared the Blue Route, ~ Daniel Gottlieb