#Cancer

"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."

"Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem."

"Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."

"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."

"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."

"Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever."

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

"Together we can make a world where cancer no longer means living with fear, without hope, or worse."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always"

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

"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.)"

"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."

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