#Cancer

"Cancer gave me an understanding of the point of all this. To survive. Most of our lives it is easy but for the moments when it becomes difficult, when accident or sickness or sadness strikes, it's just about remembering one thing. You must simply survive."

"Life in itself is a big classroom - so learn all the chapters of life well. This chapter of illness is but only one chapter. Learn whatever it has come to teach you and move on in life."

"Maybe you should say goodbye, Cal.''No.''It might be important.''It might make her die."

"The goal is to live a full, productive life even with all that ambiguity. No matter what happens, whether the cancer never flares up again or whether you die, the important thing is that the days that you have had you will have lived."

"This is the story of how Dad lived with his lung cancer. But it is much more. Through his illness and the miracles we experienced, I came to see that Dad's was not just a journey. It was a journey home. Home to God."

"The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease."

"Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air."

"Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever."

"But all that is warm will go cold. My ears will fall off and my eyes will melt. My mouth will be clamped shut. My lips will turn to glue....No taste or smell or touch or sound.Nothing to look at. Total emptiness for ever."

"You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself."

"Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always"

"You need to spend time crawling alone through shadows to truly appreciate what it is to stand in the sun."

"Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of."

"Suspicion is the cancer of friendship."

"He can heal me. I believe He will. I believe I'm going to be an old surely Baptist preacher. And even if He doesn't...that's the thing: I've read Philippians 1. I know what Paul says. I'm here let's work, if I go home? That's better. I understand that."

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"Breast cancer deaths in America have been declining for more than a decade. Much of that success is due to early detection and better treatments for women. I strongly encourage women to get a mammogram."

"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."