Cancer Stinks Quotes

Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep quiet even if the body it’s attached to is stabbed or burnt, or stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad.

Why did God do it? or is there really a Devil who led to the Fall? Souls in Heaven said "We want to try mortal existence, O God, Lucifer said it's great!"—Bang, down we fall, to this, to concentration camps, gas ovens, barbed wire, atom bombs, television murders, Bolivian starvation, thieves in silk, thieves in neckties, thieves in office, paper shufflers, bureaucrats, insult, rage, dismay, horror, terrified nightmares, secret death of hangovers, cancer, ulcers, strangulation, pus, old age, old age homes, canes, puffed flesh, dropped teeth, stink, tears, and goodbye. Somebody else write it, I dont know how.

The earth is parched and cracked. Men and women come together like broods of vultures over a stinking carcass, to mate and fly apart again. Vultures who drop from the clouds like heavy stones. Talons and beak, that's what we are! A huge intestinal apparatus with a nose for dead meat. Forward! Forward without pity, without compassion, without love, without forgiveness. Ask no quarter and give none! More battleships, more poison gas, more high explosives! More gonococci! More streptococci! More bombing machines! More and more of it--until the whole fucking works is blown to smithereens, and the earth with it!

Well it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths...," I began. "Go on," she said "The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy ending and all that. Like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion. But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like in Huckleberry Finn where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up." "People like happy ending, Mattie. They don't want to be shaken up." "I guess not, ma'am. It's just that there are no Captain Wentworths, are there? But there are plenty of Pap Finns. And things go well for Anne Elliot in the end, but they don't go well for most people." My voice trembled as I spoke, as it did whenever I was angry. "I feel let down sometimes. The people in the books-the heroes- they're always so...heroic. And I try to be, but..." "...you're not," Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers. "...no, I'm not. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?" I asked too loudly. "Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox," I said, pointing at a pile of them," and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?" No one spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Then Lou quietly said, "Cripes, Mattie. You oughtn't to talk like that." I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. Her eyes were fixed om me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish had said and that I should leave then and there. "I'm sorry, Miss Wilcox," I said, looking at the floor. "I don't mean to be coarse. I just... I don't know why I should care what happens to people in a drawing room in London or Paris or anywhere else when no one in those places cares what happens to people in Eagle Bay." Miss Wilcox's eyes were still fixed on me, only now they were shiny. Like they were the day I got my letter from Barnard. "Make them care, Mattie," she said softly. "And don't you ever be sorry.

Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep quiet even if the body it’s attached to is stabbed or burnt, or stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad. That what happens in every life—lived naturally or not—is neither natural nor unnatural.

I fucking stunk. I mean embarrassingly stunk, and it reflected like a funhouse mirror in the eyes of everyone present including Mother—after she’d made such a production over me being in Hollywood chasing my acting dream. Testifying-in-court kind of stink. If you’ve ever had the honor of publically sucking on a grand scale, you know that the worst part is how you’re treated afterwards. People avoid you like you’re carrying head lice or, if cornered, try to spin an illusive positive angle, as though you are somehow unaware that you just ruthlessly embarrassed yourself. I’ve had friends with terminal cancer who’ve talked about getting similar reactions. I had acting cancer.

Besides that, our potatoes have contracted such strange diseases that one out of every two buckets of pommes de terre winds up in the garbage. We entertain ourselves by trying to figure out which disease they’ve got, and we’ve reached the conclusion that they suffer from cancer, smallpox and measles. Honestly, being in hiding during the fourth year of the war is no picnic. If only the whole stinking mess were over!

In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep quiet even if the body it’s attached to is stabbed or burnt, or stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad. That what happens in every life—lived naturally or not—is neither natural nor unnatural.

Normal is whatever we’ve gotten used to in our own private universe. It’s war or cancer or poverty. Hopelessness or pain or fear. It’s the cigarette burns on the coffee table and bone-deep exhaustion and the stink of booze and the black eye from—you tell everyone who asks—running into a door. Normal is the devil-ridden quiet of three a.m. when you’re eyeball-to-eyeball with God, and you know you won’t win because the deck is stacked. Best you can do is fold. —Sydney

39. Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine. Let the part of you that makes that judgment keep quiet even if the body it’s attached to is stabbed or burnt, or stinking with pus, or consumed by cancer. Or to put it another way: It needs to realize that what happens to everyone—bad and good alike—is neither good nor bad. That what happens in every life—lived naturally or not—is neither natural nor unnatural.

As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don’t you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth’ his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything.

To the infra-human specimens of this benighted scientific age the ritual and worship connected with the art of healing as practiced at Epidaurus seems like sheer buncombe. In our world the blind lead the blind and the sick go to the sick to be cured. We are making constant progress, but it is a progress which leads to the operating table, to the poor house, to the insane asylum, to the trenches. We have no healers – we have only butchers whose knowledge of anatomy entitles them to a diploma, which in turn entitles them to carve out or amputate our illnesses so that we may carry on in cripple fashion until such time as we are fit for the slaughterhouse. We announce the discovery of this cure and that but make no mention of the new diseases which we have created en route. The medical cult operates very much like the war office – the triumphs which they broadcast are sops thrown out to conceal death and disaster. The medicos, like the military authorities, are helpless; they are waging a hopeless fight from the start. What man wants is peace in order that he may live. Defeating our neighbor doesn’t give peace any more than curing cancer brings health. Man doesn’t begin to live through triumphing over his enemy nor does he begin to acquire health through endless cures. The joy of life comes through peace, which is not static but dynamic. No man can really say that he knows what joy is until he has experienced peace. And without joy there is no life, even if you have a dozen cars, six butlers, a castle, a private chapel and a bomb-proof vault. Our diseases are our attachments, be they habits, ideologies, ideals, principles, possessions, phobias, gods, cults, religions, what you please. Good wages can be a disease just as much as bad wages. Leisure can be just as great a disease as work. Whatever we cling to, even if it be hope or faith, can be the disease which carries us off. Surrender is absolute: if you cling to even the tiniest crumb you nourish the germ which will devour you. As for clinging to God, God long ago abandoned us in order that we might realize the joy of attaining godhood through our own efforts. All this whimpering that is going on in the dark, this insistent, piteous plea for peace which will grow bigger as the pain and the misery increase, where is it to be found? Peace, do people imagine that it is something to cornered, like corn or wheat? Is it something which can be pounded upon and devoured, as with wolves fighting over a carcass? I hear people talking about peace and their faces are clouded with anger or with hatred or with scorn and disdain, with pride and arrogance. There are people who want to fight to bring about peace- the most deluded souls of all. There will be no peace until murder is eliminated from the heart and mind. Murder is the apex of the broad pyramid whose base is the self. That which stands will have to fall. Everything which man has fought for will have to be relinquished before he can begin to live as man. Up till now he has been a sick beast and even his divinity stinks. He is master of many worlds and in his own he is a slave. What rules the world is the heart, not the brain, in every realm our conquests bring only death. We have turned our backs on the one realm wherein freedom lies. At Epidaurus, in the stillness, in the great peace that came over me, I heard the heart of the world beat. I know what the cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world.

I am Sebastiano, and your name?” he asks. “Violet,” I say as we step over the threshold. “Violetta!” he says, throwing his arms wide. “English girl, Italian name!” And across the room, I see a dark head turn in our direction. That much taller than the rest of the boys, he stands out, his straight black silky hair falling over his face, his blue eyes as bright and cold as the water of the fjord next to my grandmother’s summer rental cottage. I was looking for him before and couldn’t see him anywhere; now that I’ve been distracted by dancing and a Chianti-drinking donkey, he’s spotted me. His gaze flicks like a knife between me and the boy, who’s at the gigantic wine bottle now, filling cups and handing me one. “Salute!” Sebastiano says, touching his cup to mine, and I glance up at Luca, seeing that he’s taking this in, too. A rush of confusion fills me as I toast. I’m glad that Luca’s seen me with someone else, that I haven’t been a wallflower at this party, that I’ve proved him wrong, even a little bit, because there’s a boy here who seems to like me, who’s talking to me, anyway, getting me a drink. In films, in books, flirting with a boy is a surefire way to get the one you actually like interested in you, draw him over to your side. They’re supposed to like competition, the challenge of going after a girl who’s popular. But maybe real life doesn’t quite work that way. Because Luca arches one black eyebrow, his mouth quirks up on one side in a sneer, and he turns pointedly away sliding a cigarette into his mouth, and lighting it with a flip of his Zippo. Disgusting habit, I think as firmly as I can. I’m glad he’s not coming over, smoking a nasty stinking cancer stick. It’s awful when you lie to yourself. I do think smoking is foul, but I’m also more than aware that if Luca strolled over to talk to me, with that cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, I wouldn’t walk away, complaining about the smoke; I’d stand there staring up at him, trying not to grin as widely as a five-year-old meeting Cinderella at Disneyland.

He`s put a fence around her as if she were a dirty, stinking bone of a saint. If he only had the courage to say "Take her!" perhaps a miracle would occur.

Creation Myth I'm the great-grandson of a sheep farmer, child of sumacs, trash trees shedding their ancient scales. I'm drawn from fair grass on the north end, my molecules spat from coal and cattle, the Indiana dusk. I'm notes scrawled on freezer paper, the one looped oven mitt Aunt Bev crocheted while the baby lay feverish in its crib. I rise from a day gone thin as Cousin Ceily, who wore her cancer wigs to church. I come from boys unfastening in the 4-H bathroom, the stink of urinal cakes, dirty hands that scratched an itch. I breathe in arc welders and air compressors. I breathe out milk leaking from nurse cows, Uncle Jake's spoiled old bitches. I'm run through with moths and meth labs, a child of the KKK, men who lynched Tom Shipp from a split oak in Marion, August 1930. My cells carry his shadow swaying over uncut grass. They carry my second third cousin cheering in the back. I rise from aphids in honeysuckle, egg yolks flecked with blood. Born one humid summer night, my body hums like a black cricket, transmitting August across the fields. I sing till my throat bleeds. I smoke like a pan of scorched sugar. I'll never forget the miracle of firecrackers, freezer meat, murky gray lemonade. I'm born to thunder in the veins, a child of form, a rusted gasket ring, some disenchanted thing, the promise of a worm.

Sadly people like this character exist in real life. They believe themselves better than you and I. They believe they are the top of the food chain and that we are here for their amusement to do with as they please. This isn’t the case though. We are not here for anyone else. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a leader of a free world, a highly paid actor, a successful author, doctor, nurse, nuclear engineer or even homeless with nothing to your name but the stinking clothes upon your back. We are all human. We are all equal. Never let someone treat you as anything but their equal and, if they try, cut them from your life like the cancer they truly are. Matt Shaw