Illness Quotes - Page 23

• The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions; and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil.

  Harriet Martineau

  Powerful, Sick, Evil

  Harriet Martineau (1845). “Life in the Sick-room: Essays”, p.17

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• it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

  Harriet Martineau

  Suffering, Causes, Worst

  Harriet Martineau (1845). “Life in the Sick-room: Essays”, p.195

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• Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room ... Let the nurse avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to die, let me be told that I am to die, and when.

  Harriet Martineau

  Brother, Truth, Medicine

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• No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.

  Djuna Barnes

  Men, Needs, Looks

  Djuna Barnes (2014). “Nightwood”, p.34, Faber & Faber

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• Madness to us means reversion; to such people as Una and Lena it meant progression. Now their uncle had entered into a land beyond them, the land of fancy. For fifty years he had been as they were, silent, hard-working, unimaginative. Then all of a sudden, like a scholar passing his degree, he had gone up into another form.

  Djuna Barnes

  Uncles, Hard Work, Mean

  Djuna Barnes (2016). “Vivid and Repulsive as the Truth: The Early Works of Djuna Barnes”, p.190, Courier Dover Publications

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• each time that I have run away - and from a habit it quickly became an illness - I have betrayed someone. Myself, but not always only myself.

  Storm Jameson

  Running, Betrayed, Habit

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• Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast. I'm not talking about onset or duration. I mean the quality of the insanity, the day-to-day business of being nuts.

  Susanna Kaysen

  Mean, Talking, Nuts

  Susanna Kaysen (2013). “Girl, Interrupted”, p.75, Vintage

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• This is really the common mentality of prisoners: they read with great attention all the articles that deal with illnesses and send away for treatises and "be your own doctor" or "emergency treatments" and end up by discovering that they have at least 300 or 400 illnesses, whose symptoms they are experiencing.

  Antonio Gramsci

  Doctors, Attention, Emergencies

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• How crazy craziness makes everyone, how irrationally afraid. The madness hidden in each of us, called to, identified, aroused like a lust. And against that the jaw sets. The more I fear my own insanity the more I must punish yours.

  Kate Millett

  Crazy, Insanity, Lust

  Kate Millett (1990). “The Loony-bin Trip”, p.68, University of Illinois Press

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• Mystical state, madness, how it frightens people. How utterly crazy they become, remote, rude, peculiar, cruel, taunting, farouche as wild beasts who have smelled danger, the unthinkable.

  Kate Millett

  Crazy, People, Rude

  Kate Millett (1990). “The Loony-bin Trip”, p.67, University of Illinois Press

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• Unconsciously we grow to look upon the sick as people of another world.

  I. A. R. Wylie

  People, Sick, Looks

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• The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness.

  Michel de Certeau

  Taken, Men, Order

  Michel de Certeau (2011). “The Practice of Everyday Life”, p.191, Univ of California Press

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• Expectations are usually predicated on the idea that the everyday things that happen to ordinary people shouldn't happen to you. People hold the idea of being ordinary in absolute contempt, so when they face an illness, poverty, or any kind of catastrophe, they say, 'I can't believe this happened to me.' And who did you think it was going to happen to - the woman across the street?

  Caroline Myss

  Believe, Thinking, Everyday Things

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• A sickness ... defines margins, crystallizes the shape of things.

  Martha Ostenso

  Shapes, Sickness, Margins

  Martha Ostenso (1938). “The Mandrake Root”

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• The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

  Nancy Mairs

  Long, Minorities, Warning

  Nancy Mairs (1991). “Carnal Acts: Essays”, Perennial

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• physical disability looms pretty large in one's life. But it doesn't devour one wholly. I'm not, for instance, Ms. MS, a walking, talking embodiment of a chronic incurable degenerative disease.

  Nancy Mairs

  Talking, Disease, Embodiment

  Nancy Mairs (1991). “Carnal Acts: Essays”, Perennial

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• When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body. It also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped.

  Muriel Barbery

  Home, Heart, Dark

  Muriel Barbery (2013). “The Elegance of the Hedgehog”, p.56, Gallic Books

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• For without love we will lose the will to live. Our mental and physical vitality is impaired, our resistance is lowered, and we succumb to illnesses that often prove fatal. We may escape actual death, but what remains is a meager and barren existence, emotionally so impoverished that we can only be called half alive.

  Smiley Blanton

  Vitality, Half, Alive

  Smiley Blanton (1956). “Love or perish”

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• Single people slip out of the dating market for many social, economic, psychological, and ideological reasons including marriage, illness, bankruptcy, job promotion, exhaustion, and common sense. Inevitably, however, they return because of divorce, boredom, loneliness, and memory loss.

  Linda Sunshine

  Jobs, Memories, Loneliness

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• The fields of clinical psychology and psychiatry exist specifically to help the emotionally unstable become more stable and lead happier, healthier lives. Unlike in the eras of Vincent Van Gogh and Abraham Lincoln, there is now professional help available for those who suffer from emotional illness. Treatment may require therapy or even medication, but hope is now available every single day in practically every city in the civilized world.

  David J. Lieberman

  Emotional, Cities, Psychology

  David J. Lieberman (2010). “Find Out Who's Normal and Who's Not: The Proven System to Quickly Assess Anyone's Emotional Stability”, p.161, David Lieberman

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• Above all, Alzheimer wanted the medical world to recognize that mental illnesses have an undeniable material component. There was an obvious political reason for taking such a position because it could then be established that dementia-like conditions are not part of the spiritual/theological domain, but undeniably biological in origin and therefore not attributable with moral implications.

  Margaret M. Lock

  Spiritual, Political, World

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• France, like every other Western country except the United States, has long accepted the principle that comprehensive health care is the right of every citizen. No Frenchman need ever fear that catastrophic illness will wipe him out financially. How long, do you suppose, will it take us, in the United States, to catch up?

  Suzanne Massie

  Country, Long, Principles

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• In the past, I often found that when I reached out for a fast cure it led me down a slippery slope of more medications, hopeful dependence on the next prescription and ultimately a much longer drawn-out illness.

  Carre Otis

  Past, Hopeful, Next

  "A Healing Balance" by Carre Otis, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 16, 2012.

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• How much ... did the volume of disease in a nation account for its spirit? If so, the eradication of sickness, as far as it was possible, was a responsibility a democracy must assume for its people.

  Alice Tisdale Hobart

  Responsibility, People, Democracy

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• we've got to find a better way to handle the expense of disease. Odd as it may seem, the more efficient we become in eliminating disease, the more our services are out of reach of the people.

  Alice Tisdale Hobart

  People, May, Disease

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