Disease Quotes - Page 39

• When most people said "I'm psychic, you see," they meant "I have an overactive but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie;" when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she'd much prefer not to have.

  Neil Gaiman

  Psychics, People, Imagination

  "Good Omens". Novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, 1990.

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• I hear there are people who actually enjoy moving. Sounds like a disease to me - they must be unstable. Though it does have it’s poetry, I’ll allow that. When an old dwelling starts looking desolate, a mixture of regret and anxiety comes over us and we feel like we are leaving a safe harbor for the rolling sea. As for the new place, it looks on us with alien eyes, it has nothing to say to us, it is cold.

  Jan Neruda

  Regret, Moving, Eye

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• Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.

  Deb Caletti

  Thinking, Volcanoes, Trying

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• I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Night, Alcohol, Slaughterhouse Five

  Harold Bloom, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (2009). “Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five”, p.129, Infobase Publishing

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• For what's the use of talking with a man who has a disease and thinks about the stars?

  Bertolt Brecht

  Stars, Men, Thinking

  Bertolt Brecht (2015). “Collected Short Stories of Bertolt Brecht”, p.22, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Recipe For Greatness - To bear up under loss; To fight the bitterness of defeat and the weakness of grief; To be victor over anger; To smile when tears are close; To resist disease and evil men and base instincts; To hate hate and to love love; To go on when it would seen good to die; To look up with unquenchable faith in something ever more about to be. That is what any man can do, and be great.

  Zane Grey

  Hate, Grief, Fighting

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• Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

  Ayn Rand

  Genius, May, Dimensions

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.290, Penguin

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• The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.

  Christopher Morley

  Sleep, Average, Doubt

  Christopher Morley (2013). “The Haunted Bookshop”, p.129, Melville House

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• The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.

  Mother Teresa

  Love, Peace, Loneliness

  Mother Teresa (1995). “A Simple Path-Open Market”

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• The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Sadness, Order, Break Out

  Rainer Maria Rilke (2001). “Letters to a Young Poet”

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• These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in ... Would they do it this time? Would they beat the Great Socialist and win the elections? Had they raised enough money of their own, and bribed enough policemen, and bought enough fingerprints of their own, to win? Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh.

  Aravind Adiga

  Country, Winning, People

  Aravind Adiga (2008). “The White Tiger: A Novel”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

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• I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.

  Miriam Toews

  Would Be, Body, Symptoms

  Miriam Toews (2004). “A Complicated Kindness: A Novel”, A.A. Knopf Canada

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• The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Book, Doctors, People

  KURT VONNEGUT JR (1969). “SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE”

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• A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Running, Memories, Journey

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• Don't separate the mind from the body. Don't separate even character - you can't. Our unit of existence is a body, a physical, tangible, sensate entity with perceptions and reactions that express it and form it simultaneously. Disease is one of our languages. Doctors understand what disease has to say about itself. It's up to the person with the disease to understand what the disease has to say to her.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Character, Doctors, Perception

  Susanna Kaysen (2001). “The Camera My Mother Gave Me”, p.126, Vintage

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• The master says it's a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it's a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there's anyone in the world who would like us to live. My brothers are dead and my sister is dead and I wonder if they died for Ireland or for the Faith. Dad says they were too young to die for anything. Mam says it was disease and starvation and him never having a job. Dad says, Och, Angela, puts on his cap, and goes for a long walk.

  Frank McCourt

  Brother, Jobs, Dad

  "Sorry for Your Troubles" by Frank McCourt, www.newyorker.com. June 10, 1996.

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• I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

  William Carlos Williams

  Writing, Thinking

  Quoted in Newsweek, 7 Jan 1957.

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• If loneliness is the disease, the story is the cure.

  Richard Ford

  Loneliness, Stories, Cures

  "Perspectives on Richard Ford". Book by Huey Guagliardo, p. 139, 2010.

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• A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Mean, Men, Despair

  Viktor E. Frankl (2006). “Man's Search for Meaning”, p.104, Beacon Press

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• The gods have become our diseases.

  Carl Jung

  Memories Dreams Reflections

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• Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes.

  Sarah Dunant

  Mean, Thinking, Definitions

  Sarah Dunant (2001). “Mapping the Edge: A Novel”, p.163, Random House

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• Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Uncles, Niece, Book

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• He wasn’t a carrier of commitment-phobia or other notable boy diseases and he used expensive moisturizer. That’s about all it takes to bang my gong.

  Diablo Cody

  Commitment, Boys, Bangs

  Diablo Cody (2005). “Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper”, p.88, Penguin

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• Doctors put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all.

  Voltaire

  Health, Doctors, Drug

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• It's not in the mainstream media yet, but the biggest jump in skin cancer has occurred since the advent of sunscreens. That kind of thing makes me happy. The fact that people, in pursuit of a superficial look of health, give themselves a fatal disease. I love it when 'reasoning' human beings think they have figured out how to beat something and it comes right back and kicks them in the nuts. God bless the law of unintended consequences. And the irony is impressive: Healthy people, trying to look healthier, make themselves sick. Good!

  George Carlin

  Cancer, Thinking, Media

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

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