“Falling in love is sudden, easy, and fun. It’s like a child going down a playground slide. Falling out of love is slow, difficult, and painful. It’s like watching a child die of cancer.”— Jayden Hunter, amazon.com
“No, I'm not going to tell them about the downsizing. If a patient has cancer, you don't tell them.”— Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Greg Daniels, Michael Scott, Steve Carell, imdb.com
“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.”— John Green, Augustus Waters, amazon.com
“And then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“And only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation. I couldn't unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn't want to.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a…”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“I tried to tell myself that it could be worse, that the world was not a wish-granting factory, that I was living with cancer not dying of it, that I mustn't let it kill me before it kills me, and then I just started muttering stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again until the so…”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“People talk about the courage of cancer patients, and I do not deny that courage. I had been poked and stabbed and poisoned for years, and still I trod on.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“I'm like a grenade, Mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“My dad understood my cancer the way I did: in the vague and incomplete way people understand electrical circuits and ocean tides.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of underoxygenation. So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was choosing among truths.”— John Green, Hazel, amazon.com
“I flipped through the CT scan images, the diagnosis obvious: the lungs were matted with innumerable tumors, the spine deformed, a full lobe of the liver obliterated.”— Paul Kalanithi, amazon.com
“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”— Barbara Kingsolver, amazon.com