Reflections on Illness

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. ~Susan Sontag

If we didn't love them, we wouldn't care so much. ~Martha Whitmore Hickman

But the waiting time, my brothers, is the hardest time of all. ~Sarah Doudney

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

~Dylan Thomas

Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body. ~Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

If a way to the better be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst. ~Thomas Hardy

There is a test to find if your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t. ~Richard Bach

Know, then, whatever cheerful and serene
Supports the mind supports the body too.
~John Armstrong

I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains. ~Anne Frank

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.

~Mignon McLaughlin

It's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~Abraham Lincoln

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops... at all. ~Emily Dickinson

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

~Robert Brault

Physical strength is measured by what we can carry; spiritual by what we can bear. ~Author Unknown

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. ~Marcel Proust

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

In time of test, family is best. ~Burmese Proverb

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand.

~Emily Kimbrough

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. ~G.K. Chesterton

Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. ~Eric Fromm

Love is like dew that falls on both nettles and lilies. ~Swedish Proverb

Disease is somatic; the suffering from it, psychic. ~Martin H. Fischer

Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway.

~Mary C. Crowley

Giving up doesn't always mean you are weak; sometimes it means that you are strong enough to let go. ~Author Unknown

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge we make promise only; pain we obey. ~Marcel Proust

I had a series of childhood illnesses; scarlet fever, pneumonia, polio. I walked with braces until I was at least nine years old. My life wasn't like the average person who grew up and decided to enter the world of sports. ~Wilma Rudolph, First American woman runner to win three gold medals at a single Olympics in Track and Field (Summer Olympics, Rome 1960)

Also by Wilma Rudolph: My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.

The secret of learning to be sick is this: Illness doesn't make you less of what you were. You are still you. ~Tony Snow

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. ~William Shakespeare

Emotional sickness is avoiding reality at any cost. Emotional health is facing reality at any cost.

~M. Scott Peck

In time of sickness the soul collects itself anew. ~Latin Proverb

Health is not valued till sickness comes. ~Thomas Fuller, British Clergyman and Writer, 1608-1661

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