Illness Quotes - Page 22

• Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.

  Iris Murdoch

  Bears, Harder, Persons

  Iris Murdoch (1987). “The Unicorn”, p.70, Penguin

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• There is no human relationship more intimate than that of nurse and patient, one in which the essentials of character are more rawly revealed.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Character, Nurse, Essentials

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• Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. ... You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but will be soon,' but you know you won't.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Depression, Jobs, Divorce

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.133, Pan Macmillan

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• Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Moving, Reality, Mind

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2009). “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness”, p.67, Vintage

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• Illness is the opposite of freedom. It makes everything impossible.

  Francoise Sagan

  Opposites, Impossible

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• Nature alone cures. ... what nursing has to do ... is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.

  Florence Nightingale

  Nursing, Nurse, Patient

  Florence Nightingale, Michael D. Calabria, Janet A. Macrae (1994). “Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale: Selections and Commentaries”, p.17, University of Pennsylvania Press

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• diseases, as all experience shows, are adjectives, not noun substantives.

  Florence Nightingale

  Adjectives, Nouns, Disease

  Florence Nightingale (1860). “Notes on Nursing: What it Is, and what it is Not”, p.47

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• Illness is regarded as a crime, and crime is regarded as illness.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Crime

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1997). “An Accidental Autobiography”, Mariner Books

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• Disease may score a direct hit on only one member of a family, but shrapnel tears the flesh of the others.

  Betty Rollin

  Tears, May, Disease

  Betty Rollin (2008). “Last Wish”, p.122, PublicAffairs

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• There's some herb that's good for everybody, except for them that thinks they're sick when they ain't.

  Sarah Orne Jewett

  Healing, Thinking, Sick

  Sarah Orne Jewett (2016). “The Country of the Pointed Firs”, p.45, Sarah Orne Jewett

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• The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

  Susan Sontag

  People, Interesting, Made

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness.

  Susan Sontag

  Believe, Health, Reality

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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• Illnesses have always been used as metaphors to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust.

  Susan Sontag

  Unjust, Metaphor, Used

  Susan Sontag (2013). “Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors”, p.56, Penguin UK

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• Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

  Susan Sontag

  Character, Tests, Moral

  Susan Sontag (1979). “Illness as metaphor”, Vintage

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• Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious.

  Susan Sontag

  Disease, Mystery, Enough

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• Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.

  Joan Didion

  Pain, Yoga, Anxiety

  Joan Didion (2013). “The White Album”, p.115, Zola Books

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• And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I.

  Joan Didion

  Pain, Understanding, Doe

  Joan Didion (2006). “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction”, Everyman's Library

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• That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

  Joan Didion

  Pain, Blessing, Migraine

  Joan Didion (2013). “The White Album”, p.113, Zola Books

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• Nervous breakdowns can be highly underrated methods of spiritual transformation.

  Marianne Williamson

  Spiritual, Transformation, Nervous

  Marianne Williamson (1992). “A return to love: reflections on the principles of "A course in miracles"”

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• No statistical proofs exist that prayer reduces illness and mortality, except perhaps through a psychogenic enhancement of the immune system; if it were otherwise the whole world would pray continuously.

  E. O. Wilson

  Prayer, Religion, World

  E. O. Wilson (2014). “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, p.364, Vintage

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• Home is the best place to be sick in.

  Margaret Deland

  Home, Sick, Best Place

  Margaret Deland (1969). “Dr. Lavendar's People”

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• When mental sickness increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.

  George Sand

  Fighting, Effort, Causes

  George Sand (1977). “The Intimate Journal of George Sand”, Chicago Review Press

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• I get lots of awards for being mentally ill. Apparently, I am better at being mentally ill than almost anything else I've ever done. Seriously - I have a shelf of awards for being bipolar.

  Carrie Fisher

  Awards, Bipolar, Done

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• My mom had the breakdown for the family, and I went into therapy for all of us.

  Carrie Fisher

  Mom, Mental Illness, Breakdown

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• People who praise illness as bringing out the best in people ought to have their heads examined. Pain forces you to think about yourself, directs your interest to your own body and what is happening to it. You don't reach out benevolently, filled with good will for others. You don't seem to care enough. Pain makes you a little person, not a big one, and not a nice one, except perhaps in the case of saints, and I've never known one.

  Rae Foley

  Pain, Nice, Thinking

  Rae Foley (1976). “Put out the light”, Dodd Mead

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