"Illness reduces man to his basic state: a cloaca in which the chemical processes continue. The meaningless hegemony of the involuntary."
— Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky)

"When I started writing
I was a sick teenaged
fuck inside who partly
thought I was the new
Marquis de Sade, a body
doomed to communicate
with Satan who was us-
ing my sickness as his
home away from home,
and there’s your proof."
— Dennis Cooper

"To wish a healthy man to die is the wish from a mind of sickness. To wish an ailing man to die is the wish of the ambitious."
— Roman Payne

"While much psychology emphasizes the familial causes of angst in humans, the cultural component carries as much weight, for culture is the family of the family. If the family of the family has various sicknesses, then all families within that culture will have to struggle with the same malaises. There is a saying cultura cura, culture cures. If the culture is a healer, the families learn how to heal; they will struggle less, be more reparative, far less wounding, far more graceful and loving. In a culture where the predator rules, all new life needing to be born, all old life needing to be gone, is unable to move and the soul-lives of its citizenry are frozen with both fear and spiritual famine."
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run with the Wolves)

"The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what reflections of endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them!"
— Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)

"There is an energy which springs from sickness and debility: it has a more powerful effect than the real, but, sadly, expires in an even greater infirmity."
— Novalis

"Done to death by slanderous tongue"
— William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing)