No Cure For Being Human: And Other Truths I Need To Hear Quotes
"Nothing is inevitable. History is made by people who stared, blinking, into the uncertain future."
"American culture has popular theories about how to build a perfect life. You can have it all if you just learn how to conquer your limits."
"There is no formula. We live and we are loved and we are gone."
"I want to believe I’m independent, but I am caught in a web, and every choice I make pulls at its threads."
"Nothing will add up to enough. I wish someone had told me that the end of a life is a complex equation."
"We fall ill. We get old. We can’t have that baby or keep that relationship."
"The hours in each day will not amount to more rubber boots and winter coats."
"I always wondered if I felt so at home in America because of its famous love of efficiency, an ideal untarnished since the Industrial Revolution."
"Every day we are speeding toward a future where I can’t find him."
"I had heard the phrase 'spending time' again and again without grasping its meaning. But since my diagnosis, I see that a well-spent day is a feat of accounting."
"This will be a hard journey. Is there anything you can set down?"
"What can’t you live without? North American culture has been obsessed with that question ever since they stopped having to worry about it."
"Even the guides to living with the bare essentials are a kind of theater."
"Choices are luxuries, allowing us to maintain our illusion of control."
"Pragmatism is not simply an effort to be practical. It’s a sprawling set of philosophical arguments."
"There are things I cannot do without—things I do not have."
"A pure pragmatism tolerates no sentimentality."
"In times of tragedy, everyone is an accountant."
"Bureaucracies are automated systems made up of people who must choose each and every day whether their job will require any of their humanity."
"The best person to have in a foxhole knows the cost of what must be done."
"But it is much easier to count items than to know what counts."
"We are grass, murmur the scriptures. Our crowns are just flowers. We are here and then gone in a burst of wind."
"The terrible gift of a terrible illness is that it has, in fact, taught me to live in the moment."
"Hope for the future feels like a kind of arsenic that needs to be carefully administered, or it can poison the sacred work of living in the present."
"Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die to a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life."
"Everything is a risk. There is something kind of wonderful about being afraid when you remember that not all risks are equal."
"No one tells you that fear is extremely boring."
"I’ve heard people say that life is like a roll of toilet paper: the closer you get to the end, the faster it goes."
"But moms do not get buried," he says sharply. It is a question as much as a demand.
"Normally, people get old before they die," I finish uncertainly.
"God, don’t you make me go out there and lie for you again," he hissed.
"This might be my last trip ever, so…do you want to do everything?"
"There is nothing more beautiful to me than the good-natured way that Zach smiles even as he is pulled unwillingly into a new day."
"Americans love to say that they have 'no regrets.'"
"I’m everyone’s inspiration and no one’s friend."
"There was something incredibly meaningful about the world of cancer, about embracing the full spectrum of reality."
"There is no such thing as a finished life, Kate."
"And we are going to make some family memories dammit!"
"The truth is there on the page. Some of us responded to the immunotherapy drug and lived; and many did not respond and died."
"After years of asking for facts that seemed locked away, I feel like I have finally been handed a key."
"This is the modern Space Race—the cure for every cancer."
"How are you feeling? Let’s look at the scan and see where we should go from here."
"My hopes were simple—I wanted to survive for my son."
"Life is not a series of choices. So often the experiences that define us are the ones we didn’t pick."
"It is irrepressibly familiar, the sense that the world is suddenly growing smaller and the time growing shorter."
"We cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more."
"God, let me see things clearly. I must accept the world as it is, or break against the truth of it: my life is made of paper walls. And so is everyone else’s."
"Our lives are not problems to be solved. We can have meaning and beauty and love, but nothing even close to resolution."
"Time really is a circle; I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can’t return to and a future that is uncertain."
"It’s wonderfully unnecessary, isn’t it? All of our masterpieces, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. All of our work, unfinished, unfinishable."