Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

I began to discover that, in addition to her stunning achievements, there were flaws as there would be in any person's life. I wanted to tell Madam's story in an honest, frank way.

Perhaps the best thing about biographies is that they enable us to slip the strictures of time and provide a bracing corrective to our tendency to see everything in the dark glass of our own era, with all its blind spots, motes, beams, and distortions.

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

It started off with flu-like symptoms and pain; then, I started feeling really funny. In two weeks, I was paralyzed from the waist down, and it spiraled down from there. Every ability I had was slowly slipping away.

I've always been a person that thinks nonfiction is more interesting than fiction, I love to read presidential biographies.

In history books, or the one about the guy who cut his hand off to get out of a canyon in Utah, you really want them to be accurate. But my stuff is such small beer by comparison.

What you seem to find when you get into this biography business is that people tend to have an image of themselves that they want to project, and they want to color statements by this image.

I've been very open about my health challenge because I think it's really important to let my constituents know that in spite of the fact that I am still in treatment, nothing about this treatment prevents me from doing my job.

If there is a tendency in modern television I hate, it is the unstoppable march of the dramatic reconstruction to tell the stories of anything from an ancient Egyptian battle to the early life of Paul Gascoigne.

Chemo does its best to make you lose your femininity. You lose your hair. You lose your eyelashes. You lose your eyebrows.

I remember seeing my father shaving my mother's head in the bathroom after her chemo treatments; It was so traumatizing.

The economic system is acting like a cancer on humanity. The regulatory system, the accountants, the legal firms support the metastasizing of this cancer.

First I lost weight, then I lost my voice, and now I've lost Onassis.

Dense overgrown forests and rangelands have grown like a cancer. They need to be treated.

humanity is a cancer on the body of the world

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

To coexist with communism on the same planet is impossible. Either it will spread, cancer-like, to destroy mankind, or else mankind will have to rid itself of communism (and even then face lengthy treatment for secondary tumors).

Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.

Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is thegrowth of madness denied.

You feel fine, and then, when your body can't keep fighting, you don't.

I think it was a realization of this cancer, an understanding of the broader implications of what cancer is. The greed, the ravaging of lands and seas for profit, the taking of things that don't belong to us; what we've done to the environment in this fast-paced, careless hunger. I think all of that was happening in my body.

It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.

Much like the removal of moles and skin lesions is done to prevent them from growing into more serious skin abnormalities, removing minor discord before it becomes a calamity is an important use of our time. Most people don’t like to make waves and they swallow frustration and bury true feelings, not wanting to compromise temporary tranquility, never realizing that massive turmoil doesn’t start out massive—it grows beneath the skin like a cancer that could have been avoided with early detection.

The unchecked striving for more, for endless growth, is a dysfunction and a disease. It is the same dysfunction the cancerous cell manifests, whose only goal is to multiply itself, unaware that it is bringing about its own destruction by destroying the organism of which it is a part.

There were silences in my head. I could abandon myself completely to the pleasure of multiple relationships, to the beauty of the day, to the joys of the day. It was as if a cancer in me had ceased gnawing me. The cancer of introspection.