Kick Cancer Quotes

Just deleting vandalism on the Chuck Norris page," Radar said. "For instance, while I do think that Chuck Norris specializes in the roundhouse kick, I don't think it's accurate to say, 'Chuck Norris's tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drive me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart.

This is not a book in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty... what you will.

It's not in the mainstream media yet, but the biggest jump in skin cancer has occurred since the advent of sunscreens. That kind of thing makes me happy. The fact that people, in pursuit of a superficial look of health, give themselves a fatal disease. I love it when 'reasoning' human beings think they have figured out how to beat something and it comes right back and kicks them in the nuts. God bless the law of unintended consequences. And the irony is impressive: Healthy people, trying to look healthier, make themselves sick. Good!

I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse . . . To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and the manner in which you live.” His words were as raw, honest, and powerful as the man himself.

I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)

What to Accept The fact of mountains. The actuality Of any stone — by kicking, if necessary. The need to ignore stupid people, While restraining one's natural impulse To murder them. The change from your dollar, Be it no more than a penny, For without a pretense of universal penury There can be no honor between rich and poor. Love, unconditionally, or until proven false. The inevitability of cancer and/or Heart disease. The dialogue as written, Once you've taken the role. Failure, Gracefully. Any hospitality You're willing to return. The air Each city offers you to breathe. The latest hit. Assistance. All accidents. The end.

Most would live into adulthood, as Patrick had. (Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five…so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)

It wasn’t Dean’s fault,” Allie insists. “Seriously, it’s all on me. I freaked out for no reason.” She finally looks over at me. “See? This is why I don’t like horror movies! You watch one scary movie when you’re a kid and suddenly everyone who comes to your door is a serial killer.” “Are you kidding me right now? You’ll watch a horror movie with my sister but not me? We have to watch the cancer movie?” “Dicky,” Summer chides. “You’re being grumpy.” I glare at my sister with enough force to make her wince. “Not one word out of you,” I snap. “And don’t think I didn’t feel you kick me right before I passed out. Who does that, Summer? Who kicks a man when he’s down?” From the corner of my eye, I see Tucker sink to the floor. He buries his face in his hands, shaking with laughter. The EMT blocks my line of sight by squatting in front of me. “I need to examine you for a concussion.” Oh for fuck’s sake.

Once you start questioning the bad stuff that comes your way, you have to start questioning the good—and I wouldn’t trade the good for anything.

This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.

You know what I’ve never done at a sporting event? Boo. I don’t get the whole idea of booing. You’re booing someone because they just failed at something? Seriously? Do you know how hard it is to do what they’re doing? That they’re among the best in the world at what they do?

IT IS SENSIBLE of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.

I know what you are going to say: sticks, stones, and broken bones, but words can kick you in the gut. They wriggle underneath your skin and start to itch. They set their hooks into you and pull. Words accumulate like a cancer, and then they eat away at you until there is nothing left. And once they are let loose there really is no taking them back.

And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap...it drives me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.

In football, as in life, the hits you don’t see coming are the ones that do the most damage.

So often, growing up is about conforming to labels: There are the jocks, the nerds, the brainiacs. We never thought like that. That

When does the part where I become a bigger person kick in?

Prayer is an interesting thing. I’m not a loud God Squad guy; when guys imply in interviews that the Lord made them juke that defender and score that touchdown, it tends to rub me wrong. I pray, but I pray for His will to be done—not mine. I acknowledge in every prayer that what I want may not be what He wants.

The main problems with America’s addiction-treatment system stem from its roots in the archaic notion that addiction is a choice, not a disease. One common symptom of the disease of addiction is relapse. Kicking an addict out of treatment for relapsing is like kicking a cancer patient out of treatment when a tumor metastasizes.

And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap... it drives me nuts sometimes... I want to kick them out immediately... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women... they're all masochists at heart.

Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

Being self conscious is second nature, or maybe first nature. I still struggle sometimes but then I tell myself, You know what? My friend Brandy who died of cancer would have given anything to trade places with me right now and she'd kick my ass for wasting time worrying about it. I have a healthy body. I'm criticizing myself because, what, I have a little bit of cheese on my thighs? Sometimes, you have to gut check yourself. I have a gut. Check.

What she and others discovered begins to explain why things like smoking or coal mining or sunbathing are so carcinogenic. Each activity injures the tissue and damages the DNA. When the tissue is damaged, the immune system kicks in and cleanses the site and helps stimulate new tissue growth. The trouble is that when the DNA is damaged, the new cells that grow can be malignant cells, some that are made up of self but that are different enough to behave like a cancer.

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters. Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.

Remember during the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, those images of people on their roofs while makeshift boats full of people sailed by? Well, this is my boat-people analogy. We’ve been flooded and I’m in a boat that’s gliding by everyone I know on top of those roofs. But my boat only holds fifteen people. I got my girls, my family, my closest friends. When your boat is full, it’s not like you’re saying to everyone else on those roofs, “I don’t care about you.” It’s just that these are my boat people and I’ve gotta save them. Because they’re in the fight with me. This is crucial: When you take on cancer, you’re not alone. Of course, that’s not how it feels when you first hear those words: “You have cancer.” At that moment, you feel more alone than you’ve ever been. You’re standing in place, numb, and the world is rushing by.

Pete walks in front of me, and I reach out and shove his hip. He looks down at me. “Are you guys talking about my ass?” he asks. He looks down at his butt, making a big deal of it. “I mean, damn, I know it’s pretty, but still.” I place my shoe on his butt and kick him to the side. He walks over and hides behind Reagan. “Look what he did, princess,” he says. “He kicked me.” He wraps his arms around her and says, “Go kick his ass for me, will you?” He shoves her in my direction. Everyone knows that Reagan is a martial arts expert and she’s flipped me over her shoulder more than once in practice situations. I hold up my hands in surrender. “Please don’t,” I say. “I had cancer,” I remind the crowd. I still get brownie points. Reagan laughs. “You can’t pull the cancer card anymore,” she says. “Two years with a clean bill of health.” She holds up two fingers. “Remember, we had a party to celebrate?

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters. Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this? Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how, find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar, dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled in her airy robes, suck her nothing juices, lap, lap, lap, a dog in the ether, then climb down to this fat earth and slouch around the fat earth in your stone shoes, get clobbered by a runaway target, take the senseless blows again and again, a right to the mind, piledriver on the heart, kick in the scrotum, help! help! it's my time, my second, my splinter of the shit glory tree, police, fire men! look at the traffic of happiness and crime, it's burning in crayon like the akropolis rose! And so on.

Say what you will about Lance Armstrong—I think he did whatever everybody else in his sport was doing, and that it shouldn’t tarnish his accomplishments on a bike—but what is undeniable is that here was a world-class athlete who got cancer in his brain and in his nutsack. And he basically said, “Screw that. I’m getting off this table.” I dig that. I played sports all my life and I dig that attitude. Okay, you’re hurting? Get up anyway.

When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live, and the manner in which you live.

I closely resembled a man who had just suffered a roundhouse kick to the bojangles by a drunken woman who somersaulted out of a bathroom. I became equal parts shocked and horrified. I

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.

I learned that what I thought was appendicitis was actually a rare form of cancer, was . . . fear.

You’re not supposed to have salt.” “I’m not supposed to have cancer, either. If you don’t bring me some brandy, I’m kicking you off my property.

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you.

Being on a plane . . . and hearing a baby crying. That’s the sound of life, man. Moms: Stop apologizing for your kid crying—he or she has a right to be there. I love to revel in the beauty of a baby’s cry.

Something had been instilled in me that wasn’t going to let the irrational anger of strangers make me doubt my own identity.

Breast cancer patients need real hope they too can kick boob cancer’s ass!

I know what you are going to say: sticks, stones, and broken bones, but words can kick you in the gut. They wriggle underneath your skin and start to itch. They set their hooks into you and pull. Words accumulate like a cancer, and then they eat away at you until there is nothing left. And once they are let loose there really is no taking them back.

The best thing to do," said one of the malingerers, "is to sham madness. In the next room there are two other men from the school where I teach and one of them keeps shouting day and night : 'Giordano Bruno's stake is still smoldering ; renew Galileo's trial !'” “I meant at first to act the fool too and be a religious maniac and preach about the infallibility of the Pope, but finally I managed to get some cancer of the stomach for fifteen crowns from a barber down the road." "That's nothing," said another man. "Down our way there's a midwife who for twenty crowns can dislocate your foot so nicely that you're crippled for the rest of your life.” “My illness has run me into more than two hundred crowns already," announced his neighbor, a man as thin as a rake. "I bet there's no poison you can mention that I haven't taken. I'm simply bung full of poisons. I've chewed arsenic, I've smoked opium, I've swallowed strychnine, I've drunk vitriol mixed with phosphorus. I've ruined my liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my heart—in fact, all my insides. Nobody knows what disease it is I've got." "The best thing to do," explained someone near the door, "is to squirt paraffin oil under the skin on your arms. My cousin had a slice of good luck that way. They cut off his arm below the elbow and now the army'll never worry him any more.” “Well," said Schweik, "When I was in the army years ago, it used to be much worse. If a man went sick, they just trussed him up, shoved him into a cell to make him get fitter. There wasn't any beds and mattresses and spittoons like what there is here. Just a bare bench for them to lie on. Once there was a chap who had typhus, fair and square, and the one next to him had smallpox. Well, they trussed them both up and the M. O. kicked them in the ribs and said they were shamming. When the pair of them kicked the bucket, there was a dust-up in Parliament and it got into the papers. Like a shot they stopped us from reading the papers and all our boxes was inspected to see if we'd got any hidden there. And it was just my luck that in the whole blessed regiment there was nobody but me whose newspaper was spotted. So our colonel starts yelling at me to stand to attention and tell him who'd written that stuff to the paper or he'd smash my jaw from ear to ear and keep me in clink till all was blue. Then the M.O. comes up and he shakes his fist right under my nose and shouts: 'You misbegotten whelp ; you scabby ape ; you wretched blob of scum ; you skunk of a Socialist, you !' Well, I stood keeping my mouth shut and with one hand at the salute and the other along the seam of my trousers. There they was, running round and yelping at me. “We'll knock the newspaper nonsense out of your head, you ruffian,' says the colonel, and gives me 21 days solitary confinement. Well, while I was serving my time, there was some rum goings-on in the barracks. Our colonel stopped the troops from reading at all, and in the canteen they wasn't allowed even to wrap up sausages or cheese in newspapers. That made the soldiers start reading and our regiment had all the rest beat when it came to showing how much they'd learned.

Cancer walked over to him and kicked the cot. Ian’s eyes burst open and he sat up, meeting Cancer’s eyes in alarm as he removed his earbuds. “What’s up?” Nodding to his earbuds, Cancer asked, “What are you listening to?” “‘Piano Concerto Number Five in E-Flat Major.’ Why?” “Funny.” Cancer grinned. “I took you for a gangster rap kinda guy.” “Really?” “No.

Seventh of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone Larry Levis living down in the flat part of Virginia draws his life In a Late Style of Fire his obituary doesn't say it but drugs killed him one way or another of course they don't print those sorts of things in papers didn't used to in poems neither where he wrote about jacking off sending meth for god to try he was teaching then at the same college we'd find you or you'd find yourself getting kicked out of for growing weed I wonder what Levis knew about Rome its firemen the most American things you ever heard of that never heard of America - When that great aunt died we included After a long battle with breast cancer in the draft of her obituary the paper took out breast too sexy for the news when you died nobody included how in the paper for the sake of decorum as if they were pulling something off as if people around here saw an obit for a 25-year-old no listed cause of death thought anything other than overdose or suicide the only folks fooled are those from the future the ones combing death records to find out how we lived the trouble with decorum the future won't know who did this to us who and how bad

My last chemo treatment was right around the corner. The enemy I'd pictured pulling a sneak attack on me was losing. My healthy-cell cancer fighter's were kicking in the swinging doors like an old Western movie and smoking those cancer cells one by one. They were doing the physical work; the least I could do was the mental olympics. The unexpected gift of mental fortitude feels like a secret in the breast cancer sisterhood community. Let’s vow to one another to accept positive energy only, including from our brains to ourselves.

I’ve been criticized for being too chummy with and soft on athletes. That critique is born of a very particular type of journalism: one in which predominantly white, middle-aged writers and broadcasters paternalistically judge young, often black, athletes. I’ll ask tough questions, if need be. But they’ll be in service of explaining rather than judging. The viewer can then judge for him- or herself.

Ray Scott was a federal postal inspector—the dude carried a gun and cuffs; I’d grow muscles when the neighborhood kids would see him. He promised his four kids that he’d pay our college tuition if we maintained a 2.0 grade point average. After my sophomore year, I was skating along with a 2.7. Dad said he was restructuring our deal—he’d only pay if I kept a 3.0 or better. “That’s crap,” I said. That wasn’t the deal. It wasn’t fair—a common refrain from my teenagers today. But then something happened: In the fall of my junior year, I was heavily involved with my fraternity, I played club football, and I posted a 3.2 GPA. The next semester, I upped that to 3.6. The following one, 3.4. I remained pissed until years later, when it dawned on me: Dad knew I was better than a 2.7 student. And he knew I needed to be pushed. Funny, isn’t it, how much smarter our dads are when we get older?

When Taelor competed in dance and Sydni in soccer, I would tell them, “Nerves are good.” What are nerves, after all? They’re just energy.

I’m not trying to “Kumbaya” you. My daughters are teenagers, man. Sydni is in perpetual eye-roll mode and Taelor is a typical college student; she’ll call for advice or to ask for money or to share a joke—only, of course, not as often as her needy Dad wishes she would. Teenage girls are a whole ’nother thing. They get angry with me, annoyed, embarrassed. Friends tell me they’ll come around. Teenage girls always come around to their dad eventually. But that well-meaning advice strikes to the heart of my fear. I don’t have “eventually.” The truth is, I’m not as afraid of dying as I am of not being here for my daughters’ aha moment. I’m on the clock and I want to be here when they get it—when they get what I got about my dad: that all the stuff he did that ticked me off? He did that for me.

SOME YEARS AGO, I read the following quote from Spike Lee and thought instantly of my time at UNC: “It comes down to this,” he said. “Black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it’s been a quest since then to define who we are.

little over a year ago, I got some heat for something I tweeted: “True racism is group w majority/economic/political power discriminating against others . . . Blacks/Hispanics can be ANGRY/RUDE but not ‘Racist.’” Man, you can guess how that went over. But I stand by it. Racism is the institutional manifestation of prejudice. Black people can be prejudiced and ignorant, yes, but since blacks by and large don’t control our institutions, they don’t have the power to act on those impulses, to subjugate others. This is something I learned forty years ago in Winston-Salem. I don’t care if someone—white or black—doesn’t like me because of what I look like. If they can act on that dislike in a way that harms me, then we’ve got a problem.

It felt like a national kick in the gut when Terry was forced to end his run in Thunder Bay, Ontario. He died a few months later. I’m still amazed as to Terry’s modest goal of raising one dollar from every Canadian. All these years later, his run has raised almost a billion dollars for cancer research.

Time’s been stolen, but there is still time. Woe be to the man who sees no future. It's no way to live.

Our cool factor went off the charts with Stu roaming the halls and performing “Rapper’s Delight” on karaoke nights. He brought a spirit and a style that had never been seen, never been felt before, at ESPN.

What would we do with freedom if we had it, Kosta? What has the West done with it? Eaten it. Put it in its belly. A great wondrous belly, that’s the West. With a wise head on top of it, a man’s head, with a man’s mind and eyes—but the rest all belly. He can’t walk any more. He sits at table eating, eating, thinking up machines to bring him more food, more food. Throwing food to the black and yellow rats under the table so they won’t gnaw down the walls around him. There he sits, and here we are, with nothing in our bellies but air, air and cancer, air and rage. We can still walk. So we’re yoked. Yoked to the foreign plow. When we smell food we bray and kick. —Are we men, though, Kosta? I doubt it.

From this perspective of cancer as a metabolic disease, insulin and IGF promote the cancer process through a series of steps. First, insulin resistance and elevated levels of insulin trigger an increased uptake of blood sugar (glucose) as fuel for precancerous cells. These cells then begin producing energy through a mechanism known as aerobic glycolysis that is similar to what bacteria do in oxygen-poor environments. (This phenomenon is known as the Warburg effect and was discovered in the 1920s by the German biochemist and later Nobel Laureate Otto Warburg, although its importance in the cancer process was not embraced until recently.) Once cancer cells make this conversion, they burn enormous amounts of glucose as fuel, providing them, apparently, with the necessary raw materials to proliferate. By metabolizing glucose at such a rapid rate, as Thompson suggests, these cancer cells generate relatively enormous amounts of compounds known technically as “reactive oxygen species” and less technically as “free radicals,” and these, in turn, have the ability to mutate the DNA in the cell nucleus. The more glucose a cell metabolizes and the faster it does so, the more free radicals are generated to damage DNA, explains Thompson. And the more DNA damage, the more mutations are generated, and the more likely it is that one of those mutations will bestow on the cells the ability to proliferate without being held in check by the cellular processes that work to prevent this pathological process in healthy cells. The result is a feed-forward acceleration of tumor growth. While this is happening, the insulin and IGF in the circulation both work to signal the cell to keep proliferating, and to inhibit the mechanism (technically known as apoptosis, or cell suicide) that would otherwise kick in to shut it down.

know people don’t know what to say, so they just talk to fill the awkward silence and stuff comes out. They don’t mean to say the wrong thing. But, listen, y’all: You don’t have to say anything at all. Just wrap your arms around me and squeeze. A hug speaks volumes. That’s what I do when I meet someone who is also in the fight. I grab on and don’t let go. Or just say, “I’m really sorry you’re going through this.” That’s all, man. It ain’t hard if you keep it simple and real.

Robin and I would talk about how those who weren’t in CancerWorld didn’t get it. “Yeah,” I remember Robin saying, “everyone wants to know how you’re doing, and they don’t get that you’ll reach out to the people you want to reach out to.