The Undying Quotes

“Suppose for a moment the claims about pain’s ineffability are historically specific and ideological, that pain is widely declared inarticulate for the reason that we are not supposed to share a language for how we really feel.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“The exhausted are the saints of the wasted life, if a saint is a person who is better than others at suffering. What the exhausted suffer better is the way bodies and time are so often at odds with each other in our time of overwhelming and confused chronicity, when each hour is amplified past circadianism, quadrupled in the quarter-hour's agenda, Pomodoro-ed, hacked, FOMO-ed, and productivized. The exhausted are the human evidence of each minute misunderstood to be an empire for finance, of each human body misunderstood to be an instrument that should play a thousand compliant songs at once.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Disease is never neutral. Treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“My work is to inhabit the silences with which I have lived and fill them with myself until they have the sounds of brightest day and loudest thunder.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care

“Amnesia is vice-president to pain and the mother of philosophy.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“If you begin to accept your illness, or even to love it, you worry that you might want to keep it around. You think, when you feel bad, that you will never long for it, but in truth you do, since it provides such clear instruction for existing, brings with it the sharpened optics of life without futurity, the purity of the double vision of any life lived on the line.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Every person with a body should be given a guide to dying as soon as they are born.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“A person who complains about any aspect of breast cancer treatment in public is often drowned out by a chorus of people, many of whom have never had cancer, accusing her of ingratitude, saying she is lucky, warning her that her bad attitude may kill her, reminding her she could be dead.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“A newly diagnosed person with access to the Internet is information’s incubant. Data visits like a minor god. Awake, we pass the day staring into the screen’s abyss, feeling the constriction of the quantitative, trying to learn to breathe through the bar graphs, head full of sample sizes and survival curves, eyes dimming, body reverent to math.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“A well person’s astral projection remains mostly atmospheric, but the deeply ill person in pain, in order to escape it, can sprint away from the pain-husk of the failing body and think themselves into a range beyond range. When pain is so vast, it makes it hard to remember history or miles per hour, which should make the sickbed the incubator for almost all genius and nearly most revolution.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“The cancer pavilion is a cruel democracy of appearance: the same bald head, the same devastated complexion, the same steroid-swollen face, the same plastic chemotherapy port visible as a lump under your skin. The old seem infantile, the young act senile, the middle-aged find all that is middle-aged about them disappears.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Mortality is a gorgeous framework. What a relief to have not been protected, I decided, to not be a subtle or delicate person whose inner experience is made only of taste and polite feeling; what a relief not to collect tiny wounds as if they are the greatest injuries while all the rest of the world always, really, actually bleeds. It's yet another error in perception that those with social protection can look at those who have at times lacked it, and imagine that weakness is in the bleeder, not those who have never bled. Those who diminish the beauty and luxury of survival must do so because they have been so rarely almost dead.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“I didn't die, or at least not of this. When I got past my cancer's immediate threat, my daughter said I had done the impossible and arranged for myself to write inside a living posthumousness. After cancer, my writing felt given its full permission. I lost some neural mitochondria and my looks and many of my memories and a lot of my intelligence and an optimitically estimated five to ten years of life span to the curative forces of medical decimation, and having lost all that, found myself to still be myself, damaged into my own intensified version. It's like the condition of lostness is, when it comes to being a person, what finally makes us real.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“I read later that feeling like you are dead can have its mechanical cause in certain kinds of brain damage, such as the kind I've endured from chemotherapy. I'm a ghost, but my loss of me isn't even metaphysical - it's mechanical. Yet the rational explanation of why I feel dead half the time does little to mediate the irrational horror of existing in a way that I feel I don't exist. Here we are, here I am, alone and myself, half of me falling off, half of us gone, and all of us as ghosts or the undying ones, half of us dead and half of myself nowhere to be remembered or to be found.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“People with cancer are not put in prisons or mental hospitals or homeless shelters like others who are considered deviant, although there are many sick people in all of those places, too, sick with cancer without a bed to sleep in or throwing up from chemotherapy inside a prison ward. But our hypothetical sick person, if cancer is her one big problem, rotates in and out of clinics and emergency rooms and intensive care, as if she is a car submitted for service that will keep it barely running but always coughing exhaust.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“I once had hair. I would brush it out and put it in a loose knot on top of my head, wash my face, pat on serums and lotions, wear pajamas, climb into a made bed, read myself to sleep, wake up in the morning and take down my hair, go to the bathroom and look in the mirror to see if anything about me had changed in the night. I would apply sunscreen, mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, earrings, check for chips in my nail polish, find pleasure in clothes and sex, feel hungry for food. Now I am ashamed that I had ever been so unphilosophical as to search in a mirror for a wrinkle, ashamed also about how I used to covet my physical pleasures in the manner of a miser whose tiny purse they believe to be full of riches but is full of nothing but carefully accounted-for-decay. I am ashamed that I should ever have been like a dog who thought its purpose was in guarding the modest portion of deception and ephemerality that is sometimes mistaken for beauty. This is not anything I want anyone to know about me.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“And after treatment, when my body was wrecked, when my body was like a car with parts that kept falling off, when I failed at, as U.S. disability laws calls it, "basic activities of daily living," I wondered how all those dollars had passed through my body and I was still left in such bad shape. If I calculated the cost of each breath I took after this cancer, I should breathe out stock options. My life was a luxury good, but I was corroded, I was mutilated, I was uncertain. I was not okay.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Someone once said that choosing chemotherapy is like choosing to jump off a building when someone is holding a gun to your head. You jump out of fear of death, or at least a fear of the painful and ugly version of death that is cancer, or you jump from a desire to live, even if that life will be for the rest of its duration a painful one.

There is a choice, of course, and you make it, but the choice never really feels like yours. You comply out of a fear of disappointing others, a fear of being seen as deserving of your suffering, a hope that you could again feel healthy, a fear that you will be blamed for your own dying, a hope that you can put it all behind you, a fear of being named as the person who cannot cheerfully submit to every form of self-preservative self-destruction written in the popular instructions. You comply from ritual obedience, as when the teacher hands out exams, or the bailiff says "All rise," or the minister entreats a prayer, or the cops shout "Move along." You comply from hope that obedience now will result in years in which you can disobey later. You comply because the only other option might be to drink carrot juice and die of your own cellular proliferation refusing to admit your own mortal vulnerabilities, pinning heartbreaking notes about spontaneous remission around your room.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“Now it wasn't just that my hair would fall out, it was that my follicles would die, and painfully, that what once grew would stop growing even as I myself kept living, and everything I once understood about the world as evident would be subject to another proof.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying

“The world is guaranteed to change, as everything does, but the sickness inside you could last forever, becoming more of itself while you become less. But if you begin to accept your illness, or even to love it, you worry that you might want to keep it around. You think, when you feel bad, that you will never long for it, but in truth you do, since it provides such clear instruction for existing, brings with it the sharpened optics of life without futurity, the purity of the double vision of any life lived on the line.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness

“To be declared with certainty ill while feeling with certainty fine is to fall on the hardness of language without being given even an hour of soft uncertainty in which to steady oneself with preemptive worry, aka now you don’t have a solution to a problem, now you have a specific name for a life breaking in two. Illness that never bothered to announce itself to the senses radiates in screen life, as light is sound and is information encrypted, unencrypted, circulated, analyzed, rated, studied, and sold. In the servers, our health degrades or improves. Once we were sick in our bodies. Now we are sick in a body of light.”
― Anne Boyer, The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness

“mientras que los dioses están hechos de todo, son las personas las que están hechas de lenguaje.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“Existe la condición de sentirse como una ciudad cuyo mayor interés son las ruinas.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“Es mentira que estemos siempre solos en el dolor, creo. Que el lenguaje falla, otra. Es la historia la que falla al dolor, como también falla al lenguaje. Pero la verdad de la historia es también la verdad del lenguaje y ésta es que todo cambia, siempre y más pronto que tarde.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“Si la enfermedad es un espacio y el dolor un lapso de tiempo, ninguno de ellos podría ser una identidad.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“Todos nosotros en la sala de infusión uniéndonos entonces para decir que lo que parecía doler, en efecto, dolía, para que nadie volviera a decir jamás, mientras nos hacía daño, que lo que dolía de verdad (lo que nos dolía a todos) no lo hacía.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“El dolor es un sentimiento fluorescente.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“Y en la tragedia de la tragedia, y en mis contradicciones, que, sospecho, no difieren demasiado de las tuyas, esto no significa que no haya infinidad de cosas tristes e injustas e indignantes que quiero que todo el mundo sepa. Algunas cosas, no obstante, siguen siendo misteriosas y nada espectaculares y ahí, creo, reside la esperanza. El destino del mundo depende de la promesa de lo negativo, de la misma manera que nosotros podemos confiar en que la vista no es el único sentido.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“No hacen falta testigos para sufrir. En el caso de una enfermedad, la pérdida, como fuente de conocimiento, no tiene rival.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir

“resulta difícil hacerte cargo de la enfermedad y hacerte cargo de ti misma a la vez.”
― Anne Boyer, Desmorir