Top 100 My Illness Quotes
#1. Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn't want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn't feel so good today.
Rollo Romig
#2. It takes all my strength to do daily tasks. To some people, I'm just a number. I'm a projected food stamps debit card lifetime member. I'm seen as crazy or insane, but it doesn't matter. I know I am bigger than my suffering.
Jacquelyn Nicole Davis
#3. My whole family, all they talk about is food and disease. And they're competitive with illness: I have a cold. I wish I had a cold! I don't even have sinuses anymore.
Dom Irrera
#4. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me."
As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
Maggie Nelson
#5. What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
Sylvia Plath
#6. During my childhood, I had a long, dangerous spell of illness, and my health has always been delicate.
Wladyslaw Reymont
#7. I realise I might pass down an incurable illness to my son, but living based on what might go wrong seems like less and less of a life as I get older. The one thing I can try to control is whether I teach my child to be ruled by anxiety, by fear. That's something that gets passed down, too.
Victor LaValle
#8. It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a life-saver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.
Roger Ebert
#9. Should I ever again sink into illness, I'm sure I'll remember Eldric. I'll remember he cared for me. I'll remember that someone had at least taken the time to touch my face.
Franny Billingsley
#10. Armed with my positive attitude and inherent stubborn nature, I keep my mind focused and my life moving forward. I stop to rest, pout and even cry sometimes, but always, I get back up. Life is giving me this challenge and I will plow through it, out of breath with my heart racing if I have to.
Amy B. Scher
#11. I am one of millions who have been treated for depression and gotten well; I was lucky enough to have a psychiatrist well versed in using lithium and knowledgeable about my illness, and who was also an excellent psychotherapist.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#12. My dad believes that bad disguises itself - that danger hides. I think it's the opposite. The truly horrible things about the world are always reaching out for you.
Brian James
#13. Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
Marya Hornbacher
#14. My handbag turned into a diaper bag for the chronically ill.
Tracey Berkowitz
#15. Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.
Jane Green
#16. When she woke briefly during her last illness and found all her family around her bedside: "Am I dying or is this my birthday?"
Nancy Astor
#17. I was surprised by the growl that wanted to well up in my throat ... I told myself it was stress, not my illness's way of saying, Get your own take-out.
Lia Habel
#18. I'm afraid to see a psychiatrist about the voices in my head. She might know who they are.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#19. No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day.
Charlotte Bronte
#20. Sometimes," says a fellow depressive, "I wish I was in a full body cast, with every bone in my body broken. That's how I feel anyway. Then, maybe, people would stop minimising my illness because they can actually see what's wrong with me. They seem to need physical evidence.
Sally Brampton
#21. Am I cured?"
"No. You're someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.
Paulo Coelho
#22. My therapist told me that I over-analyze everything. I explained to him that he only thinks this because of his unhappy relationship with his mother.
Michel Templet
#23. I've got asthma. When I was 17 I forgot to take my medication and was taken to a hospital for almost two weeks. After that I've taken better care of my illness.
Ville Valo
#24. Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?
Carrie Fisher
#25. I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.
Alice Notley
#26. Well, I like to think that my illness has prevented me from rising to any number of dizzy heights.
Christopher Monckton
#27. Some of us will experience some form of mental illness in their lifetime... I rather have depression that can be treated with a pill and my free will to conquer it; than have a physical illness that results in my demise because no matter what I did I could not conquer it.
Brian Michael Good
#28. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.
Jennifer McMahon
#29. Part of my approach to my illness has been to say I want to choose life, I want to keep going, I want to live fully until I die.
Thea Bowman
#30. I've got to that point in life when there's very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there's one thing about the pills I take. My manic episodes have taken a break
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#31. Prideful fool. It hurt his feelings that he couldn't make my crazy go away. You know how men are. Always trying to fix things can't be fixed.
Ken Wheaton
#33. Above all, do not loose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
Soren Kierkegaard
#34. I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling. I didn't know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home ...
Juliann Garey
#35. My love has saved me. It wraps strong arms around me when I cry with despair;it gives me the routine of a working week to lend vicarious structure to my shapeless days. It brings me daily laughter, a reason to keep washing...and it slices me open with guilt.
Anna Lyndsey
#36. My painful memories sift through me like sand through stretched fingers. Only small pieces cling and stay around for me to keep, the rest just disappear. I know not where and I don't
Willow Madison
#37. During my mental illness, thank God, my grandma was my human rescuer and angel, she ask me to stop taking the medication, leading to the recovering.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#38. It was nice doing my own Joy Division book to be able to put forward the fact that Ian was actually quite a nice guy and very hardworking, ambitious and loyal. But the thing was, he was battling such a dreadful illness in an era when they really didn't know how to treat it.
Peter Hook
#39. What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears; gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you're the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own.
Mira Bartok
#40. As no one knew much about my mental illness, a lot of people had the attitude that I had the capability to 'kick it' and get better instantly. This was the most frustrating attitude for me.
Andy Behrman
#41. I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.
Carl Hiaasen
#42. Though my mental illness is more likened to a big, nasty green monster than something heart-wrenchingly beautiful, I think I have learned many wonderful lessons from my many afflictions.
Jacquelyn Nicole Davis
#43. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.
Soren Kierkegaard
#44. Friends and family were convinced I was functioning just fine because I was efficient, productive and successful - who wouldn't be working twenty hour days? I had everybody fooled with my illness.
Andy Behrman
#45. My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.
James Hillman
#46. Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought, Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody's going down.
Lance Armstrong
#47. My pillow is as good as any ocean
to drown in the nightmare of myself.
I swam all the way here from the moon.
Casey Renee Kiser
#48. You say I resemble a flower; I partly agree; My brain is governed by black petals of burnt daisies
Anne Sexton
#49. I've accepted the fact I have mental illness but when my imaginary friends start calling me crazy that's where I draw the line
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#50. Illness isolates; the isolated become invisible; the invisible become forgotten. But the snail ... the snail kept my spirit from evaporating.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
#51. It dawns on me that maybe I'm just terrifically lazy; that I might be appropriating other people's invisible sicknesses and disorders and scribbling them on the clipboard at the end of my bed to fool the nurses; so I can indulge in rest cures all day, every day. That I'm even fooling myself.
Jalina Mhyana
#52. Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.
Elyn Saks
#53. My twenties were a write-off. It's a cruel illness, because you can't see it and you can hide it so well.
Sarah Lancashire
#54. As we begin to transform, illness and pain can also be seen as a "messenger" for spiritual growth. What does this illness mean? What can I learn from this? Why is the occurring in my life
Teresa DeCicco
#55. A naturopath once told me you should never take antibiotics except if you have pneumonia, a kidney infection or some other serious illness. That's my philosophy, too.
Pamela Sue Martin
#56. My illness is one often characterized by dramatic overspending - in my case through frenzied shopping sprees, credit card abuse, excessive hoarding of unnecessary material goods and bizarre generosity with family, friends and even strangers.
Andy Behrman
#57. I didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world.
But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.
Francesca Zappia
#58. I felt an attack of my most chronic illness - the pain of missing out.
Steve Toltz
#59. I'm tired of dealing with crazies. When did it become my job to manage your mental illness?
Joan Rivers
#60. I want this girl I know i'll never have.But in my mind she'll always be my lady.I fell in love with her instantly after seeing her beautiful face online.I always dreamed and fantasized about her ever since then. She's just breathtaking to me.
Jared Padalecki
#61. My character in 'Running With Scissors' is manic-depressive. She starts out as a wonderfully eccentric person, and then descends into a terrible illness.
Annette Bening
#62. The first time I saw her,
Everything in my head went quiet.
Neil Hilborn
#63. My illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.
Lee Atwater
#64. I've really been grappling with depression. It's all linked with my cocaine and ecstasy abuse.
Robbie Williams
#65. Each small accommodation of my physical environment is an admission that things are not improving, that this is not some fleeting horror, that perhaps...But that is the unthinkable thought.
Anna Lyndsey
#66. I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.
Franz Kafka
#67. You are someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that in my view is a serious illness. God chose you to be different. Why are you disappointing God with this kind of attitude?
Paulo Coelho
#68. what once cause catastrophe in my life has now become the catalyst for my direction.
Nikki Rowe
#69. Never for one minute have I taken you for reality . . . You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#70. I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.
John Steinbeck
#71. My life up until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices. As in most modern narratives, a character's fate depended on human actions, his and others.
Paul Kalanithi
#72. I have this one little life to live with, it's not the plan I had in mind but I can accept its the calling of my soul. The irony in gaining freedom through the heartbreak of stillness.
Nikki Rowe
#73. My family and friends were definitely the key to my recovery. One thing that I do suggest is that anyone dealing with a life-threatening illness like cancer choose a point person for people to call to find out how you are doing - a sister, brother, mother, father, daughter, son, or close friend.
Olivia Newton-John
#74. Something has gotten into me; something I didn't want. The moment my skin touched hers, it overwhelmed me with desires of the deepest kind. It's crawled beneath my flesh, and my every pore is infected by her. An addiction that is as frustrating as this illness.
LeeAnn Whitaker
#75. I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.
Hugo Wolf
#76. And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel.
Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her.
And a little scared. Well, a lot scared.
Sherman Alexie
#77. As a resident, my highest ideal was not saving lives -- everyone dies eventually -- but guiding a patient or family to an understanding of death or illness.
Paul Kalanithi
#78. I thought having a chronic illness would make my life detour in ways I didn't want to accept, but I've learnt that have a chronic illness made the only detours that are worth the growth.
Nikki Rowe
#79. It's for personal reasons, I say stiffly, which is what my mother had always told me to say about things that had to do with fighting with your brothers, getting any sort of illness that had intestinal ramifications, starting your period, and money.
Maggie Stiefvater
#80. After so many months of hoping, long spells of illness and worry and confinement, I hold in my arms my darling child. Everything else fades away. She is perfect.
Kate Morton
#81. Do they think I'm on drugs? That I have a life-threatening illness? That I'm anorexic? Emotionally, it doesn't get easier to hear those criticisms - but it gets easier to be resolute about my reaction to it.
Fiona Apple
#82. My family and high school friends were the only people who were with me every step of the way through my mothers' illness. They sat by my side year after year and consoled me. If they ever sent me a bill, I would be paying them off for the rest of my life.
Jenna Morasca
#83. My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.
Marya Hornbacher
#85. My daughter, unfortunately, is ill, because drug addiction is an illness. She's been fighting it for years.
Columba Bush
#86. Physically, I'm healthy as a horse, always held up. But in the mental illness department, I got my share. It's just what I got.
Shawn Colvin
#87. I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.
Sylvia Plath
#88. In childhood I developed a serious throat infection, and my heart stopped beating. I recovered from that illness with a voice that boomed forth like Kate Smith's!
Patsy Cline
#89. Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
Jasmine Warga
#90. My voice is loud and piercing, and I project like I was once told by a doctor during a childhood illness that I would never speak again.
Mindy Kaling
#91. The theatre is my drug. And my illness is so far advanced that my physic must be of the highest quality.
John Wilmot
#92. In my head maybe it was a test of love, because there are things about illness which I find revolting.
Jackie Kay
#93. The creature who lives inside my brain suggested I do it," I offered tentatively. "It was very convincing.
Joss Sheldon
#95. I hated that the greatest enemy of my lifetime... was also my truest love.
Bailey Vincent
#96. My father's very public life as Famous Amos was the opposite of that of his ex-wife, my mother Shirley, who was fighting a very private, solitary battle with mental illness.
Shawn Amos
#97. I mean, I'm 48 years old and I've been through a lot in my life - you know, loss, whether it be death, illness, separation. I mean, the failed expectations ... We all have dreams.
Annie Lennox
#98. I've done a lot of death cartoons - tombstones, Grim Reaper, illness, obituaries ... I'm not great at analyzing things, but my guess is that maybe the only relief from the terror of being alive is jokes.
Roz Chast
#99. When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?
Michaela Haze
#100. yet still I crave the sight of my own hypnotic gaze reflecting out at me from the shared mirror of anorexia and bulimia, number to life and reality, existing only in my self-made tortured state
Carol Lee
