ILLNESS QUOTES

quotations about illness

Illness quote

The best thing about being ill is being able to watch daytime TV without feeling guilty.

BESS MACPHERSON

A Smoker's and Dog's Guide to the Gal-Alexy


A Man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he love you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.

LAUREN BACALL

Lauren Bacall By Myself


How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself.

CHARLES LAMB

"The Convalescent", Last Essays of Elia


Being ill is above all alienation from the world.

F. J. J. BUYTENDIJK

Prolegomena to an Anthropological Physiology


Disease is not a negative event, a blind fate, waiting to be eliminated from the world by technological intervention; the important thing is what we make of it, whether we consider it as an occasion to reconsider and improve our life.

HENK TEN HAVE

"The Zapping Animal: Oscillating Images of the Human Person in Modern Medicine", Life the Human Being between Life and Death


The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

JOSEPH CONRAD

Lord Jim

Tags: Joseph Conrad


Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.

GILLIAN FLYNN

Sharp Objects


My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness -- and the healthiest way of being ill -- is one most purified of, more resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one's residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it had been landscaped.

GEORGE SEBASTIAN ROUSSEAU

Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses


It is not necessarily the greatest suffering that receives the greatest consideration and sympathy. Illness is not scored that way. Deadly disease obviously scores higher than others. After that there is an unofficial ranking system for illness in which psychiatric disorders are the out-and-out losers. Psychiatric disorders manifesting as physical disease are at the very bottom of that pile. They are the charlatans of illnesses. We laugh at them.

SUZANNE O'SULLIVAN

Is It All In Your Head?


The misery of being ill is already, in itself, an encompassing state of being, but the acceptance of fate and long-term circumstance creates a "final person."

DOUG DOBRANSKY

Autumn Sister


It's normal to shy away from illness and death. It's natural to gravitate toward laughter and life.

ELLYN BACHE

The Art of Saying Goodbye


It matters not whether you place the sick man on a wooden bed or one of gold; wherever you lay him, he carries his disease along with him.

SENECA

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: Seneca


It is idle to propose remedies before we are assured of the disease.

JONATHAN SWIFT

A Modest Address to the Wicked Authors of the Present Age

Tags: Jonathan Swift


I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.

JOHN GREEN

Turtles All the Way Down

Tags: John Green


Sickness is a belief, to be annihilated by the divine Mind.

MARY BAKER EDDY

Science and Health


Being ill is being in a condition that falls short of how a human being ought to be and, in that sense, is "disordered."

ERIC MATTHEWS

"Personal Identity and Mental Health", Personhood and Health Care


Disease is sometimes worse than death.

PHERECYDES

attributed, Day's Collacon


Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them they will defend it like a lioness her young.

SIGMUND FREUD

The Question of Lay Analysis

Tags: Sigmund Freud


The ill are damped with pain and anguish at the sight of all that is laudable, lovely, or happy.

JOSEPH ADDISON & RICHARD STEELE

History, Opinions, and Lucubrations, of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq

Tags: Joseph Addison


Today's patient dies, too, in a social milieu in which being ill is a defeat, an automatic ejection from the cult of youth and health. The dying person intrudes on everyone else's pursuit of business or pleasure. In the modern world, dying is an obscenity.

HARVEY M. CHOCHINOV & WILLIAM BREITBART

"The Existential State of Incurability", Handbook of Psychiatry in Palliative Medicine