Carla O'Neill > Carla's Quotes

“Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves

“If any organism fails to fulfill its potentialities, it becomes sick.”
― William James

“You’re not doing well and finally I don’t have to
pretend to be so interested in your on going tragedy,

but

I’ll rob the bank that gave you the impression that
money is more fruitful than words, and
I’ll cut holes in the ozone if it means you have one less day of rain.
I’ll walk you to the hospital,
I’ll wait in a white room that reeks of hand sanitizer and latex for the results from the MRI scan that tries to
locate the malady that keeps your mind guessing, and
I want to write you a poem every day until my hand breaks
and assure you that you’ll find your place,
it’s just
the world has a funny way of
hiding spots fertile enough for
bodies like yours to grow roots.

and

I miss you like a dart hits the iris of a bullseye,
or a train ticket screams 4:30 at 4:47, I
wanted to tell you that it’s my birthday on Thursday
and I would have wanted you to
give me the gift of your guts on the floor, one last time,
to see if you still had it in you.

I hope our ghosts aren’t eating you alive.
If I’m to speak for myself, I’ll tell you that
the universe is twice as big as we think it is
and you’re the only one that made that idea
less devastating.”
― Lucas Regazzi

“I am not sick.
I am broken.
But I am happy to be alive.”
― Carmen T. Bernier-Grand, Frida: ¡Viva La Vida! Long Live Life!

“People who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead.”
― Ann Beattie

“Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.”
― Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

“As the Houses tumbled upon the Streets with a great roaring Noise, they cryed out We are undone! We are great Sinners! and the like: and yet as soon as the Danger was passed, they came back with their:

Hey ho the Devil is Dead!
Eat, drink, and go merry to Bed!

Thus the Sick confesse to their Contagion only when they are like to Die of it, even tho' they carry their Death with them every where.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“...whether God come to his children with a rod or a crown, if he come himself with it, it is well. Welcome, welcome Jesus, what way soever thou come, if we can get a sight of thee. And sure I am, it is better to be sick, providing Christ come to the bed-side, and draw aside the curtains, and say 'Courage, I am thy salvation,' than to enjoy health, being lusty and strong, and never to be visited of God.”
― Samuel Rutherford

“What issues sidetrack you from your mission to get well?”
― Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed: Meditations for Your Journey through Breast Cancer

“The teachers skirted our questions as best they could, though I was sure it was more from their own ignorance about what was going on than from the need to keep us in the dark. They carried on with classes, ignoring the few vacant seats, but it was hard to miss the slight pause in their lectures when a student sneezed or coughed.”
― V.C. Repetto, The Tearings

“Some people are attracted to sickness, to the kind of madness where sparks fly
off the head, to the incoherence of despair, masked by nervous energy, which winds up looking like bewildered joy.”
― Luke Davies, Candy

“According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

Maslow's pyramid seemed to imply I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I don’t understand hospital chaplains that try to rob my patients of their anger. Sometimes anger is a key motivator that gets people to take action. Anger can push a cancer patient to jump out of his hospital bed, walk down to the nurses station and scream, “I am getting the hell out of here!”. There is a misconception that God is simply sweet and passive. Actually, God can be quite cunning, manipulative and relentless with his children. What we consider as negative traits are actually helpful in molding us. He will use a negative emotion if needed to push people to do things that will change them for the better. He will allow people or situations to derail us if there is a chance that those interactions will push us forward. Personally, I don’t want a God that is going to send some church member to my deathbed with a plate of cookies and tell me to have faith. Actually, I rather have a God that screams, “Get the hell off your ass, stop feeling sorry for yourself. Walk down the hall with that Physical Therapist so you can get on with your life!" A little anger in a person can push them to do amazing things.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“I thought society would do the right thing. Now I look around and I think -- society never does the right thing. Sometimes people do the right thing. Sometimes one person makes a difference. But civilization has rules, and I've learned them well -- never be helpless, never be sick, never be poor.”
― Christina Dodd, Just the Way You Are

“Was that really all there was to love? Darkness undone, a hand on your forehead. In the meantime all you could do was wait--tired, alone, the minutes as long or short as a lifetime--for the face in your dream to appear.”
― Eric Puchner, Model Home

“...nothing more excruciating when you are fighting for your life than to have healthy people round you, squabbling over futilities. Who do you love best, and who most do you want with you? Blithering idiots: it's life itself, can't you see? It's life I love best, and life I want with me. Go hang yourselves, all of you, you're only sapping my strength when most I need it. Leave me in peace and let me grapple.”
― A.P., Sabine

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.”
― Edvard Munch

“My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”
― Edvard Munch

“From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?”
― Edvard Munch

“I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
― Edvard Munch

“I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us - I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding around me - and thus as she disappeared completely beyond the sea - I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding - because the threads could not be severed.”
― Edvard Munch

“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“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 out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Before you can live a part of you has to die. You have to let go of what could have been, how you should have acted and what you wish you would have said differently. You have to accept that you can’t change the past experiences, opinions of others at that moment in time or outcomes from their choices or yours. When you finally recognize that truth then you will understand the true meaning of forgiveness of yourself and others. From this point you will finally be free.”
― Shannon Alder

“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 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, Illness as Metaphor

“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
― Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals

“Sometimes the best and worst times of your life can coincide. It is a talent of the soul to discover the joy in pain—-thinking of moments you long for, and knowing you’ll never have them again. The beautiful ghosts of our past haunt us, and yet we still can’t decide if the pain they caused us out weighs the tender moments when they touched our soul. This is the irony of love.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“God is not here to be demanded of, begged from, or criticized. He hands out burdens to those who are strong enough to carry them, and I feel profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of lining up with the other invalids and asking for mine to be alleviated.”
― Ann Napolitano, A Good Hard Look