My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am as bald as an egg. However I still get around and am mean to cats. – John Cheever, letter to Philip Roth, 10 May 1982, published in The Letters of Jo

We “need” cancer because, by the very fact of its incurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer. – Gilbert Adair, “Under the Sign of Cancer,” Myths and Memories, 1986

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. – Arthur Somers Roche

Hope is grief’s best music. – Author Unknown