ŷ������

“Yes?�� he asked, looking at me over the sheet.
‘I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.��
‘Oh, a writer, eh?��
‘Y���.��
‘Are you sure?��
‘No, I’m not.��
‘What do you write?��
‘Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.��
‘A novel, eh?��
‘Y���.��
‘What’s the name of it?��
‘”The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.”��
‘Oh, I like that. What’s it about?��
‘E�������ٳ󾱲Բ�.��
‘Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?��
‘Y���.��
‘How about my wife?��
‘She’s in there too.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum

“But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,�� was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“I have cancer. Cancer doesn't have me.”
― Marco Calderon

“You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper." Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. "I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is the belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that.”
― Wendy Wunder, The Probability of Miracles

“The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion

“You die in the middle of your life.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Each of us carries a sleeping tiger inside, and we can’t predict when that cat will wake, stretch, and sharpen its claws.”
― Holly Robinson, Sleeping Tigers

“Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I could simply
kill you now,
get it over with,
who would
know the difference?
I could easily
kick you in, stove you
under, for all those times,
mean on gin,
you rammed words
into my belly. (p. 52)”
― Barbara Blatner

“She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.”
― Richard Ford, Canada

“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, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“oh.
she heard it
too-no waters
coursing, canyon
empty, sun
soundless-
and the beast
your life
nowhere
hiding (p. 103)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.”
― Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

“Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you.”
― Anthony Liccione

“But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“...gripping the
rim of the sink
you claw your
way to stand
and cling there,
quaking with
will, on
heron legs,
and still the hot
muck pours
out of you. (p. 27)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“blue-gold sky, fresh cloud,
emerald-black mountain, trees
on rocky ledges,

on the summit, the tiny pin
of a telephone tower-all

brilliantly clear,
in shadow and out.

and on and through
everything
everywhere
the sun shines
without reservation (p. 97)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“once ruffle-skirted
vanity table where I primped
at thirteen, opening
drawers to a private
chaos of eyeshadows
lavender teal sky-blue,
swarms of hair pins
pony tail fasteners,
stashes of powders,
colonies of tiny
lipsticks (p.39)”
― Barbara Blatner, The Still Position: A Verse Memoir of My Mother's Death

“I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way.”
― Christina Carson, Dying to Know

“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 well away from humankind”
― Jane Kenyon, Otherwise: New and Selected Poems

“Ann prayed because of a gut-wrenching, throbbing pain in her soul. She urgently begged the Lord for her life.”
― K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life

“God had not abandoned us. He was actively working behind the scenes, when I had no means or spirit to fight.”
― K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life

“She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant”
― Peter Carey, Illywhacker

“once,a boy told a girl : i will stay with you forever, little did she know that his forever is only three months because..he died of cancer!”
― - AMAL SAGHEER

“DeeDee had to have a firm grasp on reality. Yet she knew God was bigger than a pathology report. So she prayed.”
― K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life

“God dramatically slew one monstrous opponent and then threw us into the arena against a stronger and more vicious foe.”
― K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life

“Although often perceived as one disease, cancer is a number of diseases subsumed within one diagnostic label.”
― Mary Burton

“Each appointment brought fear, uncertainty and discouragement. Ann’s constant concern was, What if I have cancer?”
― K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life

“I have no guarantee that God will choose to heal Ann, but I know he wants me to pray to that end.”
― K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life