Famous Quotes & Sayings

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Probably the most important reason we are seeing more cancers than before is because the population is ageing overall. And cancer is an age-related disease.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

There is a duality in recognising what an incredible disease it is - in terms of its origin, that it emerges out of a normal cell. It's a reminder of what a wonderful thing a normal cell is. In a very cold, scientific sense, I think a cancer cell is a kind of biological marvel.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

There's a phrase in Shakespeare: he refers to it as the 'hidden imposthume', and this idea of a hidden swelling is seminal to cancer. But even in more contemporary writing it's called 'the big C'.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

I began wondering, can one really write a biography of an illness? But I found myself thinking of cancer as this character that has lived for 4,000 years, and I wanted to know what was its birth, what is its mind, its personality, its psyche?

Siddhartha Mukherjee

I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

I believe the biggest breakthroughs on cancer could come from brilliant researchers based in India.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos

Siddhartha Mukherjee

It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

All cancers are alike but they are alike in a unique way.

Sheryl Crow

Someone like me shouldnt be diagnosed with breast cancer, thats what was going through my mind. I wasnt thinking about a diagnosis. I was just doing what I was supposed to do, which was staying on top of my mammograms. It was a shock.

Sharon Jones

Not only do I say, get up and get out, I tell the cancer to get up and get out. And if you don't get up and get out, I'm going to shout you out. And I get to shout.

Sharon Osbourne

I didn't even think of my breasts in a nostalgic way, I just wanted to be able to live my life without that fear all the time. It's not 'pity me', it's a decision I made that's got rid of this weight that I was carrying around.

Natalie Goldberg

While I had cancer, I wrote these twenty-two personal essays about how I lived my life backed by Zen and writing.

Natalie Goldberg

The odd thing is, that I wrote The Great Spring while I had cancer and it's not about cancer. It was after I was done with cancer that I wrote a book about it.

Natalie Goldberg

I don't mean to be flippant about cancer - it was hard, it was tough and it was scary. Then my next manuscript was about cancer because I had a whole new topic to write about. And because I wrote, it didn't take over. Writing took the chaos out of cancer.

Natalie Goldberg

The first thing is how awful it [cancer] was, the experience. You know, when you first go through it, you're just trying to survive. But when I wrote about it, I really digested it. It was unbearable but I had practice behind me.

Natalie Goldberg

So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.

Natalie Goldberg

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

Natalie Goldberg

I read Eve Ensler and thought it was fabulous. Not only that, but it was really the only thing I could relate to about cancer.

Tony Blair

Ever so often in the history of human endeavour, there comes a breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier into a new era. ... today's announcement is such a breakthrough, a breakthrough that opens the way for massive advancement in the treatment of cancer and hereditary diseases. And that is only the beginning.

Tom Rath

The vast knowledge we have to prevent cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses is staggering.

Tom Rath

I first found out I had cancer on my eye and lost an eye to this disease when I was 16, and I've since had cancer in my kidneys and pancreas and a host of other areas,

Simone Elkeles

Our lie is like a cancer that's spread to every single area of our lives.

Karl Kraus

Social reform is the desperate decision to remove corns from a person suffering from cancer.

Joycelyn Elders

Guns kill more teenagers than the other big killers - heart disease, cancer, and AIDS - combined.

Kathy Acker

My nutritionist read my pathology report and said, "There's only one way you can beat your cancer.""What's that?""You have to find out what caused it.

Julian Huxley

The human race will be the cancer of the planet.

Paul Douglas

It's a terrible thing that we cannot really trust the FDA or NCI (National Cancer Institute). We need, therefore, an independent scientific investigation.