Cancer Quotes

“Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.”
― Lance Armstrong Sally Jenkins, Every Second Counts

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun.”
― Shaun Hick

“There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Nah. I'm a tough cookie. Except for the cancer, I'm fine.”
― Lisa Scottoline, Every Fifteen Minutes

“There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“the world wasn't made for us, we were made for the world”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
― Pablo Neruda

“A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Maybe 'Okay' will be our 'always'...”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Everyone in this world is breathing borrowed air.”
― Rachael Lippincott, Five Feet Apart

“If it's possible to send a message from heaven, I'll get one to you.”
― Lurlene McDaniel, Don't Die, My Love

“It's all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.'
'Why are you saying that?'
'She might need permission to die, Cal.'
'I don't want her to. She doesn't have my permission.”
― Jenny Downham, Before I Die

“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, The Fault in Our Stars

“I really thought she was going to die before I could tell her that I was going to die, too.”
― John Greem

“It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace...”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes
are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I am not afraid to die; I am only afraid of saying goodbye to you forever.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care.

I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.'

I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.

Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.

To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.

Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.

So, I believed.”
― Lance Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life

“I don't think you're dying," I said. "I think you've just got a touch of cancer.

He smiled. Gallows humor.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“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 with a predetermined winner”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Love"I'm in love with you," he said quietly.
"Augustus,"I said.
"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you."
"Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl