c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I am reminded of an image...that living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But that living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more -- sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.
— Nina Riggs, The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying
He put the x-ray up on the light screen: The tumor was a large white circle in the middle of the picture. It looked like a headlight coming straight at me, full-speed ahead.
— Mike Lingenfelter, The Angel by My Side: The True Story of a Dog Who Saved a Man...and a Man Who Saved a Dog
The various worms eat one's body after its death; conversely, cancer cells eat one's body, when it breathes, since the failure of medical research.
— Ehsan Sehgal
No hair? Don’t care!!
— Prajakta Mhadnak
Without hair, A queen is still a queen’.
— Prajakta Mhadnak
But that's the thing about cancer. They call it the fight, as if the stronger ones win and the weaker ones lose, but that's not what cancer is at all. Cancer isn't one of the players in the game. Cancer is the game. It doesn't matter how much endurance you have. It doesn't matter how much you've practiced. Cancer is the be-all and end-all of the sport, and the only thing you can do is show up to the game with your jersey on. Because you never know... you might be forced to sit the bench for the entire game. You may not even be given the chance to compete.
— Colleen Hoover, November 9
Bitterness is the cancer of bones.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
I’m not scared of death, Dad,” I told him. “I’m scared of not living. I don’t want to die with any regrets that I didn’t get to do the things in life that I’ve always wanted.
— Amanda Maxlyn, What's Left of Me
We’re not dead yet, so don’t talk to us like we’re about to be.
— Amanda Maxlyn, What's Left of Me
I just want it to stop. All of it. The pain. The suffering. The fucking cancer. I want it gone. I need it gone, Jean. It’s tearing me apart inside. God, I hate this. Even all the lying I’m doing to Parker. It’s breaking my heart.
— Amanda Maxlyn, What's Left of Me
I was pissed that I couldn’t go out and celebrate like someone turning twenty-one typically would, so I wore black hair to show my family just how pissed off I was.
— Amanda Maxlyn, What's Left of Me
You don’t need to be someone you’re not. Haven’t you learned that? Stop being scared and face the world. I know you’re not in remission yet, but who can say they have been through cancer twice and beat it? Confront the world, Aundrea. You’re alive. Be proud of the strong woman you are and stop hiding behind your wig.
— Amanda Maxlyn, What's Left of Me
When a disease insinuates itself so potently into the imagination of an era, it is often because it impinges on an anxiety latent within that imagination. AIDS loomed so large on the 1980s in part because this was a generation inherently haunted by its sexuality and freedom; SARS set off a panic about global spread and contagion at a time when globalism and social contagion were issues simmering nervously in the West. Every era casts illness in its own image. Society, like the ultimate psychosomatic patient, matches its medical afflictions to its psychological crises; when a disease touches such a visceral chord, it is often because that chord is already resonating.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
The worst part about cancer isn't what it does to you, but what it does to the people you love.
— Deadpool
Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
You gave me a forever within the numbered days and I'm grateful.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer's ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.
— Tony Parsons
Since cancer is an anaerobic growth, enhancing aerobic metabolism in a cancer patient is like shining daylight on a vampire.
— Patrick Quillin
Cancer gets a bad press but, fair do's, it's a truly egalitarian illness, unlike those stuck-up bastards ME and motor neurone.
— Ian Pattison, A Stranger Here Myself: Being The Life Story And Revelations Of Mister Rab C. Nesbitt Of Govan
Regarding his friend's insight after losing her spouse to cancer: "She told me she had plenty of people to do things with but nobody to do nothing with.
— Peter Bach
You will need to come in as soon as possible, the sooner we treat this, the better the chance of recovery…”Rose began to cry. “Will I die?”The doctor didn’t reply.Treatment began only days later, Rose took to it really well, phoning Kelly was the hardest part of telling the news, but Kelly supported her mother, offering to take some time out and come home to take care of her.Rose went into remission, the cancer was brought under control and Jim planned a holiday for her in Spain.Madeleine McCann a three-year-old child went missing in Portugal.Heavy flooding devastated Hull and Sheffield at least three people died. Four fire fighters were feared dead in the ‘Atherstone fire disaster.
— Ruth Watson-Morris
E.M. Ashford: And death shall be no more" comma "death, thou shalt die." Nothing but a breath, a comma separates life from life everlasting.E.M. Ashford: Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored Death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause.E.M. Ashford: In this way, the uncompromising way one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God, past present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semi-colons. Just a comma.
— Margaret Ebson
Any thought which brings with it fear, worry, anxiety etc. should be immediately banished from the mind by replacing such thoughts with self-assuring, positive and energizing thoughts. This is called 'Quantum Mind' and it can work miracles in your life.
— Sanchita Pandey, Cancer to Cure
According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Cancer though, it was a fickle friend that didn't care about your age, gender or race. It would move in take up residence and eventually kick you to the curb, it was a mean landlord and didn't care who it hurt in order to get what it wanted.
— Ella Frank, Exquisite
We normally know we're getting older, when the only thing we want for our birthday, is not to be reminded; unless you're a cancer survivor, then we love being reminded!
— Chris Geiger, The Cancer Survivors Club
Emma shut her laptop and scowled at them. “I’m pink.”She wasn’t sure when her opinion of the color changed or why, but she now took offense to outsiders putting down the pink as much as she took offense to corporations abusing the color. What she once criticized she now understood. Despite all the exploitation, there was something intangible behind the pink, a sense of connectedness, and she wanted to embrace that camaraderie.
— Lydia Michaels, La Vie en Rose: Life in Pink
There's nothing more debilitating about a disability than the way people treat you over it.
— Solange nicole
It’s as if everyone got cancer the day I was diagnosed, except I’m their tumor.
— Danielle Esplin, Give It Back
We normally know we're getting older when the only thing we want for our birthday is not to be reminded
—  unless you're a cancer survivor! Then we love people reminding us!
Sickness usually dominates the thoughts of a patient with cancer, but too much preoccupation with illness can have a destructive effect on the mind, and knowing what can happen frequently becomes self-fulfilling. Today, people who are ill will spend hours surfing the internet to find out all they can about their illness – but this isn’t always a good thing.
— Jennifer Worth, In the Midst of Life
He walked across the room and flicked a switch. A spotlight turned on, illuminating a laminated poster of a woman on his wall. He took a crayon from his pocket and began drawing on it. I could see smudges from past demonstrations. [. . .] His dashed lines crisscrossed the woman's chest as if he were planning a military maneuver on undulating terrain.
— Kim van Alkemade, Orphan Number Eight
According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.
— Pierre Berton
Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.
— Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope
Maintaining the thinnest facade of a functioning family that tries to act as others do - plan ahead, drive somewhere, go on holiday, relax - is beyond us. We are smashed. Insecurity jams the gears on every action. Each time we are toppled. I feel a fool over and over again for trying.
— Marion Coutts
These are the dilemmas for cancer patients. Who and what to believe? A particular treatment is not foolproof, or as many medical experts remind us, is not math, with a fixed and certain outcome.
— Tom Brokaw
Is that cancer curable or just treatable.
— Tom Brokaw, A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope
She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.
— Lisa Genova, Still Alice
Love will cost you dearly.And it will break your heart.But in the end, it will save the world.
— Sarah Thebarge
Everybody keeps talking about 'fighting' the cancer," he said, "everybody keeps telling me to fight for my life, to fight the disease, and how their uncle won the battle against cancer and their cousin won the fight against cancer and black blah blah blah.""Okay...and?""I'm not fighting," he said. "It's already inside me... and I'm not going to fight. I'm going to be a good host, let it pass through me.. resist nothing. Sieve. Let it all pass through.
— Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
Punching a woman is like punching a one-year old black baby in the face
— Sebastian Fors
I don’t know how,” I confessed, and I pulled my hand away so I wouldn’t hurt her in my frustration.She grabbed my hand and brought it back, this time pressing it to her heart.“I’m telling you how. You hold onto me. You trust me. You use me. You lean on me. You rely on me. You let me shelter you. You let me love you. All of you. Cancer. Fear. Sickness. Health. Better. Worse. All of you. And you’ll have all of me.
— Amy Harmon, The Song of David
Love and laughter are two of the most important universal cancer treatments on the planet. Overdose on them.
— Tanya Masse
Read
—  explore
i’m super, it’s like my favourite meal and a birthday blowjob from Christina Hendricks in here.
— David Louden, White Mexicans
And this was to save rats, right? Or mice? You spent all this money to save mice the problem of developing tumors?
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Why should I have been surprised?Hunters walk the forestwithout a sound.The hunter, strapped to his rifle,the fox on his feet of silk,the serpent on his empire of muscles—all move in a stillness,hungry, careful, intent.Just as the cancerentered the forest of my body,without a sound.
— Mary Oliver, Blue Horses
I want to be remembered as a kid who went down fighting, and didn't really lose
— Zach Sobiech
An ounce of cancer prevention is worth a ton of cancer cure.
— Robert A. Wascher, A Cancer Prevention Guide for the Human Race
Everyday is a good day, even when things are hard because we are still here, still fighting to live among the latter.
— Lisa Kinsella
Instead of a bucket list Someday Challenge™ wants you to create your Someday Slate™, a list of the things that you have promised yourself to do, things that you planned to do someday! Completing your Someday Slate™ will get you started on finally living your passion now.
— David A. Koop
The cancer bubble. It's almost like he's not here. Like he's on pause, and my life with him is on pause, and we're just waiting to see if somebody is going to hit play again or just stop the thing entirely.
— Abigail Barnette, The Girlfriend
Hormonal changes permanently alter the breast's structure. And when a pregnancy is terminated through abortion, the process is interrupted, which leaves cells in a sate of transition. And they say cells in this state have a very high risk of becoming cancerous. So the woman's chances of developing breast cancer later in life my be greatly increased.
— Francine Rivers, The Atonement Child
Cancer is WAY too serious to be taken seriously all the time.
— Tanya Masse
Just because someone has cancer, it doesn't mean you stop laughing at them or making fun of them.
— Tanya Masse
Cancer is a bitch that needs to get the crap smacked out of it. I intend to stand on the front lines with a big-ass bat.
— Brenna Aubrey, At Any Price
Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that. It's disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right? The taking-people-over business. But surely you haven't let it succeed prematurely.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
I'm not one of those people who think that cancer is some kind of jousting match. People live or die based on good medicine, good luck, and the grace of God. The people that die from it did not fail. The people who live will die another day.
— Paul Acampora, I Kill the Mockingbird
So what did you do when death came to your house? We continued in the same way as before. What is that, a failure of the imagination? Are you in denial? This is not wholly true; we continue in the same way as before but in parenthesis. My thinking has switched its grammar. The present continuous is its single operational tense. Uncertainty is our present and our future.
— Marion Coutts, The Iceberg
Stay positive, stay strong, stay together and just keep going!
— Tanya Masse
You are so high in the tree.If you jumpyou will live a full lifewhile falling.You will get marriedto a hummingbirdand raise beautiful part- hummingbirds. You will die of cancerin mid-air. I will not lie. It will be painful. You are a brave little boyor girl.
— Zachary Schomburg
Almost all the world is natural chemicals, so it really makes you re-think everything. A cup of coffee is filled with chemicals. They've identified a thousand chemicals in a cup of coffee. But we only found 22 that have been tested in animal cancer tests out of this thousand. And of those, 17 are carcinogens. There are ten milligrams of known carcinogens in a cup of coffee and thats more carcinogens than you're likely to get from pesticide residues for a year!
— Bruce Ames
Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.
— Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Bad news doesn't hurt as much, if you hear it in good company. It's like, if somebody pushes you out of a 5th floor window and you bounce off an awning, a car roof, and a pile of plastic garbage bags before you smash onto the pavement, you've got a pretty good chance of surviving.
— Patricia Gaffney, The Saving Graces
Initially, after David’s diagnosis, I would cringe when I readbooks or articles by cancer survivors who stated that cancer hadbeen a gift in their lives. How could all that David endured beviewed as a gift? The invasive surgery, the weeks of chemotherapyand radiation: a gift?Yet, after the cancer, David would often reach for my hand andsay, “If it is cancer that is responsible for our new relationship, thenit was all worth it.” And I’d reluctantly agree that cancer had been agift in our lives. We’d both seen the other alternative: patients andsurvivors who had become bitter and angry, and neither one of uswanted to become that.
— Mary Potter Kenyon, Chemo-Therapist: How Cancer Cured a Marriage
In God we trust. All others [must] have data. - Bernard Fisher
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.
— Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl
Why can someoneget so sick that the only way to get better is to make them more sick?It’s like the world’s longest exorcism. It doesn’t make sense that I canchat with someone live on a tiny screen, that governments spend billionsof dollars on war and mayhem, that actors make millions of dollarsto just look pretty and skinny, yet no one can fucking fi gure outhow to cure cancer without torturing people.
— Julie Halpern, The F- It List
When you walk this earth on borrowed time, each day on the calendar is a beloved friend you know for only a short time.
— Judith Hooper, Minding the Body
I am the sky and nothing can stick to me. The sky is open and vast and stays unchanged no matter what; it is always the sky. A storm can roll through it, an airplane can roar through, and it is always the sky.
— Geralyn Lucas, Why I Wore Lipstick: To My Mastectomy
Dear Whoever-that-just-found-out-that-they-have-a-terminal-illness, don't let that put you down. Technically, we are all dying.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament.
— Christopher Lasch
The failure to accept cancer as a systemic disease is one of the greatest failures in modern medicine.
— Michael Lam, Beating Cancer with Natural Medicine
He was one of the few people who had spoken to me as though his words were not rocks and I was not glass.
— Meredith Norton, Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting
Please don’t preach at me—I feel bad enough already.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
When life is going according to plan, we don't stop to question our daily habits...Maybe it's time to sift through our lives.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
There's only one way to become an eagle, and that's to be born an eagle.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
In God's strength I could battle the giants. Alone, I was just a grasshopper.S
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
Many patients with cancer are depressed, yet depression is not the cause of cancer.
— David S. Bell
Cancer doesn’t give a shit how much you want to live. If it wants to kill you, it will.
— A.S. King, Ask the Passengers
You die in the middle of your life.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
When one person gets cancer, the whole family gets cancer.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
No, we love war.War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.“It's the mark of a very, very young soul,” Mr. Whittier used to say, “to try and fix the world. To try and save anyone from their ration of misery.”We have always loved war. We are born knowing that war is why we're here. And we love disease. Cancer. We love earthquakes. In this amusement-park fun house we call the planet earth, Mr. Whittier says we adore forest fires. Oil spills. Serial killers.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted
Life is too precious to waste any of it regretting the past.
— Gordon Savage
In an essay titled A View From the Front Line, Jencks described her experience with cancer as like being woken up midflight on a jumbo jet and then thrown out with a parachute into a foreign landscape without a map:"There you are, the future patient, quietly progressing with other passengers toward a distant destination when, astonishingly (Why me?) a large hole opens in the floor next to you. People in white coats appear, help you into a parachute and — no time to think — out you go."You descend. You hit the ground....But where is the enemy? What is the enemy? What is it up to?...No road. No compass. No map. No training. Is there something you should know and don't?"The white coats are far, far away, strapping others into their parachutes. Occasionally they wave but, even if you ask them, they don't know the answers. They are up there in the Jumbo, involved with parachutes, not map-making.
— Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Because really, what do you have to lose? Your life? That's no big deal, I promise you. When you find out you might die, you're finally allowed to live like you never have before. If you lose your life while living the shit out of it, then you've done the best you could, and you shouldn't worry about death. When you're dead, you can't screw up. But while you're here, all you have are a few things to call your own. You have your integrity, your family, and your hope for the future. These are important and you should keep them somewhere safe where you'll remember them.
— Kevin Lankes
I've learned so much during my time with cancer. It's taught me a lot about who I am. It revealed to me my true goals and priorities. It introduced me to a brand new world where time isn't wasted, and important things aren't left unsaid. All the while, the superfluities of life are ignored and forgotten. Because I now understand how a person should act, whether confronted by death or not. And it's a shame that's what it takes to scare someone into becoming a conducive, meritable human being.
— Kevin Lankes
We can look at our tattoos from cancer treatment as awful reminders of a ghastly time in our lives, or we can use them as reminders of what God brought us through.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
Nothing takes God by surprise, not even cancer.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
The pain he feels in his own gut is either something to do with the caffeine, or the stress of realizing that if it's not snipers or blindness stealing your children, it's cancer coming to snipe your wife, and there's not a fucking thing a guy can do about any of it except to drop to his knees and pray, to pretend like someone or something that gives a shit is on teh other end of the line, to pretend anything, like you did when you were a kid until the pretending seems real, because without that all you've got for comfort is what's in front of your face...
— Scott Wrobel
The devil sought to destroy me and discredit my testimony. But God wanted me where I would testify to others about his saving power.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
Cancer may have blindsided you, but it didn't blindside God.~ Strength Renewed
— Shirley Corder
The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.
— Dan Simmons, The Rise of Endymion
Cancer is finite. God is way bigger.
— Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer
My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war with a predetermined winner
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Yes?’ he asked, looking at me over the sheet.‘I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.’‘Oh, a writer, eh?’‘Yes.’‘Are you sure?’‘No, I’m not.’‘What do you write?’‘Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.’‘A novel, eh?’‘Yes.’‘What’s the name of it?’‘”The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.”‘‘Oh, I like that. What’s it about?’‘Everything.’‘Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?’‘Yes.’‘How about my wife?’‘She’s in there too.
— Charles Bukowski, Factotum
But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer
— Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion
But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
— Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
God had not abandoned us. He was actively working behind the scenes, when I had no means or spirit to fight.
— K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life
God dramatically slew one monstrous opponent and then threw us into the arena against a stronger and more vicious foe.
— K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life
She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant
— Peter Carey, Illywhacker
For whatever time I have to live, I intend to enjoy myself." - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live.
— Rachele Baker, An Inspiring True Story: Eighteen Months To Live
We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live
— Rachele Baker, An Inspiring True Story: Eighteen Months To Live
Although often perceived as one disease, cancer is a number of diseases subsumed within one diagnostic label.
— Mary Burton Maggie Watson
Each appointment brought fear, uncertainty and discouragement. Ann’s constant concern was, What if I have cancer?
— K. Howard Joslin, Honest Wrestling: Questions of Faith When Attacked by Life
I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.
— John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Even now, it's still hard for him to say it. I don't blame him. It's an icky word. Why couldn't whoever was in charge of naming things call cancer 'sugar' and sugar, 'cancer'? People might not eat so much of the stuff then. And it's so much more pleasant to die of sugar.
— Sarah Wylie, All These Lives
Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.
— Wally Lamb, She's Come Undone
50,000-63,000 individuals in the United States and 19,000-25,000 in the UK die prematurely from cancer annually due to insufficient vitamin D.
— John Cannell
She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.
— Helen Hodgman, Jack and Jill
Lockhart'll sign anything if it stands still long enough.
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
A man's vanity is more fragile that you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference.
— Lisa Kleypas, Devil in Winter
There's something ugly about a pretty boy who knows he's pretty and assumes everyone else know it too.
— Nova Ren Suma, Imaginary Girls
Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.
— Blaise Pascal
We all know you're beautiful, Scott.
— Becca Fitzpatrick, Silence
Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous.
— Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.
— Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
I was sorry for her; I was amazed, disgusted at her heartless vanity; I wondered why so much beauty should be given to those who made so bad a use of it, and denied to some who would make it a benefit to both themselves and others.But, God knows best, I concluded. There are, I suppose, some men as vain, as selfish, and as heartless as she is, and, perhaps, such women may be useful to punish them.
— Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
I'm brilliant as well as skilled," he said modestly. "It's a great burden, all of that on top of my angelic good looks. But I try to soldier on as best I can.
— Jim Butcher, Dead Beat
She also considered very seriously what she would look like in a little cottage in the middle of the forest, dressed in a melancholy gray and holding communion only with the birds and trees; a life of retirement away from the vain world; a life into which no man came. It had its attractions, but she decided that gray did not suit her.
— A.A. Milne, Once on a Time
But who bothers looking beyond the surface? Who even knows anything about Cinderella's Prince Charming - other than he's a handsome prince?
— Mandy Hubbard, Ripple
But I begin to fancy you don't like me. How strange! I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me. (Catherine Linton, nee Earnshaw)
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
No matter what the circumstances, no man can completely escape from vanity.
— Shūsaku Endō, Silence
It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.
— Edith Wharton
It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Long ago one of the Cynic philosophers strutted through the streets of Athens in a torn mantle to make himself admired by everyone by displaying his contempt for convention. One day Socrates met him and said: 'I see your vanity through the hole in your mantle.' Your dirt too, sir, is vanity, and your vanity is dirty.
— Milan Kundera, Farewell Waltz
The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
— Colum McCann, TransAtlantic
Clichés so often befall vain people.
— Ann Beattie, Walks with Men
A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead
I would have chosen any other than this for my prison. A rhinoceros is as ugly as a human being, and it too is going to die, but at least it never thinks that it is beautiful.
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
You'll forgive the flowery talk, won't you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit.
— Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden
So might we ourselves look down into some rock-pool where lowly creatures repeat with naive zest dramas learned by their ancestors æons ago.
— Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
I'm not good, of course; I wouldn't give a fig to be good. So it's not vanity. It's on a far grander scale; a splendid selfishness, - authorized, too; and papa and mamma brought me up to worship beauty, -and there's the fifth commandment, you know.
— Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Amber Gods and Other Stories
All these handsome guys are the same. When they're done combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
— David Nicholls, One Day
I was good at being charming, one of my very few vanities.
— Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter
The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it; for, however absurd it may be thought to boast an honour by an act which shows that it was conferred without merit, yet most men seem rather inclined to confess the want of virtue than of importance.
— Samuel Johnson, The Rambler
What a situation!' cried Miss Squeers; '...What is the reason that men fall in love with me, whether I like it or not, and desert their chosen intendeds for my sake?' 'Because they can't help it, miss,' replied the girl; 'the reason's plain.' (If Miss Squeers were the reason, it was very plain.)
— Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
I hope the artist who illustrates this work will take care to do justice to his portrait. Mr. Clive himself, let that painter be assured, will not be too well pleased if his countenance and figure do not receive proper attention.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, The Newcomes
One quick glance in the mirror is enough for a lifetime.
— Marty Rubin
Cole was meticulous to a fault
—  office scuttlebut had it that he never went out in public without first having his shoelaces ironed.
Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
It is vanity to chase the whirlwind.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Blacheville smiles with the self-satisfied smugness of a man whose vanity is tickled
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Of all the weaknesses that beset a man, vanity is the most deadly. For through vanity can a wise man turn to folly.
— Raymond E. Feist, Exile's Return
You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else - to a man looking at you, from behind, when you don't know - because in a mirror your own head is always cranked around over your shoulder. A coy, inviting pose. You can hold up another mirror to see the back view, but then what you see is what so many painters have loved to paint - Woman Looking In Mirror, said to be an allegory of vanity. Though it is unlikely to be vanity, but the reverse: a search for flaws. What is it about me? can so easily be construed as What is wrong with me?
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Vanity dulls the senses.
— Nadja Sam
Vanity is a defensive quality. it contains an element of fear.
— Don DeLillo, The Names
Her eyes are shockingly black - shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she's wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season
Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
I just don't get it. You've been in love with this bloke since you were a kid, and he's never once got his hair cut short enough that it doesn't poke him in the damn eye.
— Kristina Adams, What Happens in New York
Naivete in grownups is often charming
—  but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.
— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Sorry we’re late. Liam had to make sure his hair fell just right.
— Kristina Adams, What Happens in New York
Why do you chase the wind?
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Everyone thinks they're living in end times. Everyone thinks their life is meaningless. It makes vanity easy.
— Matt Spire, Caligatha
She [Mrs. Badger] was surrounded in the drawing-room by various objects, indicative of her painting a little, playing the piano a little, playing the guitar a little, playing the harp a little, singing a little, working a little, reading a little, writing poetry a little, and botanizing a little. She was a lady of about fifty, I should think, youthfully dressed, and of a very fine complexion. If I add to the little list of her accomplishments that she rouged a little, I do not mean that there was any harm in it.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear.
— Charles Dickens, Bleak House
But that, in shutting out the light of day, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in this world?
— Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Gertrude, behind her, again had just one... That one little feather she had as a starter. But now that's enough, because now she is smarter.
— Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and other Stories-Bartholomew and the Oobleck
he talked until their food arrived, littering his chat with references to ‘ninety k’ and ‘a quarter of a mill’, and every sentence was angled, like a mirror, to show him in the best possible light: his cleverness, his quick thinking, his besting of slower, stupider yet more senior colleagues...
— Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm
Vain until the bitter end.
— Sarah J. Maas, Queen of Shadows
Doesn't matter how pretty you are. What's important is how pretty you feel. No one feels pretty when they hear "no" often enough.
— Jim Butcher, Skin Game
I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egoist… he was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.
— Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Like all vain men, he had moments of unreasonable confidence.
— Warren Eyster, The Goblins of Eros
There are many people in the world who are running after vanity. They are striving after things that the Lord is not building.
— Sunday Adelaja
Humility is the only defence against vanity
— Steven Aitchison
He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. --from a Difference in Temperament
— Daphne du Maurier, The Doll and Other Stories
Every teacher are once a student, Every professional are once an amateur, Every rich are once a poor, Every motorist are once a learner, Every friend are once a stranger, Every ex are once a lover, Every today are once a tomorrow, Every emigrate are once a citizen, Every dead are once alive, Every house are once a land, Every super star are once an upcoming, Every winner are once a dreamer and every start always have an end. Stay humble and Positive, afterall life is vanity- Goals Rider
— Goals Rider
She seemed to be lovely still to herself, as if no amount of looking into mirrors could ruin her illusion.
— Elizabeth  Taylor
I have been merely oppressed by the weariness and tedium and vanity of things lately: nothing stirs me, nothing seems worth doing or worth having done: the only thing that I strongly feel worth while would be to murder as many people as possible so as to diminish the amount of consciousness in the world. These times have to be lived through: there is nothing to be done with them.
— Bertrand Russell
Vanity is a weakness. I know this. It’s a shallow dependence on the exterior self, on how one looks instead of what one is.
— Dennis Lehane, A Drink Before the War
My vanity suggested I should take offense, but the deeper part of me was relieved- relieved that he was noble enough to want to make such a sacrifice from his heart rather than from his desire to impress me.
— Jody Hedlund, An Uncertain Choice
The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
— Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.
— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Mirrors are dangerous things. They can just as easily tell us what we don't like as what we do. Yet in truth you can't tell anything from a reflection, as a reflection is actually empty.
— Susie Staplehurst
However anxious one is to reach one’s goal, one can excuse delays on the route when these are caused by ovations.
— Alexandre Dumas
Robert Ashford possessed one of the key character flaws necessary to a traitor. He thought he was smarter than everyone else. This allowed the overeducated career bureaucrat to sell out his own country, because he believed he knew what was best for his nation and its people.
— Brad Thor, Full Black
If I'd been born ugly, you'd never have heard of Pelé.
— George Best
This life is full of vanity
— Fabcos Famas
What's the matter with you, Penny? You're not as good looking as you generally believe you are.
— L.M. Montgomery
Jo, they have a baby grand piano, but no one in the family plays. They have shelves of books they've never read, and the tension between the couples was so thick it nearly choked us.""Let me tell you something 'bout those rich Uptown folk," said Cokie. "They got everything that money can buy, their bank accounts are fat, but they ain't happy. They ain't ever gone be happy. You know why? They soul broke. And money can't fix that, no sir. My friend Bix was poor. Lord, he had to blow that trumpet ten hours a day just to put a little taste in the pot. Died poor, too. You saw him, Jo, with that plate on his chest. But that man wasn't soul broke.
— Ruta Sepetys, Out of the Easy
What if this is a horrible mistake?" I croaked. "Oh, it'll be horrible fine, just a bunch of pretentious rich people with shelves of expensive books they've never read.
— Ruta Sepetys, Out of the Easy
Admiring and a little overwhelmed by the simple opulence of the limousine’s interior, she shook snowflakes from her scarf and tresses, hoping the rare effort she had put into doing her hair was not entirely r
— Roberta Pearce, The Value of Vulnerability
Even eighty-odd is sometimes vulnerable to vanity.
— L.M. Montgomery, Chronicles of Avonlea
For as love is oftentimes won with beauty, so it is not kept, preserved, and continued, but by virtue and obedience.
— Thomas More, Utopia
One of the characters in our story, Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin, belonged to the other category; he belonged to the category of "much cleverer" people; though head to toe he was infected with the desire to be original. But this class of person, as we have observed above, is far less happy than the first. The difficulty is that the intelligent "ordinary" man, even if he does imagine himself at times (and perhaps all his life) a person of genius and originality, nevertheless retains within his heart a little worm of doubt, which sometimes leads the intelligent man in the end to absolute despair. If he does yield in this belief, he is still completely poisoned with inward-driven vanity.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The false face had been handsome, yes, but consciously so. As though he was too aware of his own attractivensss, something she found distinctly unappealing.
— Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Vanity and superficiality, placed deliberately on display, can be a burden; take this nonsense overboard.
— Kristian Goldmund Aumann
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun, as Solomon said more than three thousand years ago.