“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
“Hospital time takes place in another dimension, in a subterranean sort of zone where the world outside feels unreal and remote, where it can feel like you’re wading through hip-high waves, salt water screwing up your vision and clogging your ears.”— Mary Taugher, narrativemagazine.com
“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank…”— Gillian Flynn, amazon.com
“Only then did I realize that during the three weeks that had passed between taking the taxi to Lenox Hill, on the fourteenth of June, and receiving the results of the full-body PET scan, on the eighth of July, I had allowed this year’s most deeply blue nights to come and go without my notice. What d…”— Joan Didion, amazon.com