{"quotes":[{"text":"She wished she had cancer instead. She'd trade Alzheimer's for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted herself the fantasy anyway. With cancer, she'd have something to fight. There was surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. There was the chance that she could win. Her family and the community at Harvard would rally behind her battle and consider it noble. And even if it defeated her in the end, she'd be able to look them knowingly in the eye and say good-bye before she left.","author":"Lisa Genova","tags":["alzheimer-s-disease","bargaining","cancer","coping-mechanisms","disease"],"id":121,"author_id":"Lisa+Genova"},{"text":"Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host.","author":"William S. Burroughs","tags":["bureau","bureaucracy","bureaucratization","bureaucrats","cancer"],"id":4629,"author_id":"William+S.+Burroughs"},{"text":"Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.","author":"John Green","tags":["cancer","depression","dying","life"],"id":6701,"author_id":"John+Green"},{"text":"I do not wish my anger and pain and fear about cancer to fossilize into yet another silence, nor to rob me of whatever strength can lie at the core of this experience, openly acknowledged and examined ... Imposed silence about any area of our lives is a tool for separation and powerlessness.","author":"Audre Lorde","tags":["cancer","death","feminism","illness","silence"],"id":7460,"author_id":"Audre+Lorde"},{"text":"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.","author":"Audre Lorde","tags":["cancer","differences","feminism","illness","silence","speaking-out","truth","women","words"],"id":7740,"author_id":"Audre+Lorde"},{"text":"She blew more smoke toward me, a lazy game of cancer catch.","author":"Gillian Flynn","tags":["cancer","cigarette","cigarettes","death","inevitable","smoke","smoking"],"id":8521,"author_id":"Gillian+Flynn"},{"text":"The urge to fight, to maul, to murder: it is the greatest cancer that afflicts mankind. It obliterates the body of the victim, and the spirit of the the one who strikes the blow. I have seen it...","author":"Garth Ennis","tags":["body","cancer","fight","mankind","maul","murder","spirit"],"id":11104,"author_id":"Garth+Ennis"},{"text":"The cancer bubble. It's almost like he's not here. Like he's on pause, and my life with him is on pause, and we're just waiting to see if somebody is going to hit play again or just stop the thing entirely.","author":"Abigail Barnette","tags":["cancer"],"id":11952,"author_id":"Abigail+Barnette"},{"text":"The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war.","author":"Siddhartha Mukherjee","tags":["cancer","medicine","oncology"],"id":13409,"author_id":"Siddhartha+Mukherjee"},{"text":"What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.","author":"John Green","tags":["cancer"],"id":13932,"author_id":"John+Green"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":440,"pages":44,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}