Oriana Fallaci Quotes

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

I would urge the government to allocate more funds toward fighting cancer. My own situation, it made me think. It made me think about the potential of dying. I wouldn't say I was scared. I'm more scared of how it will happen than of it happening. I'm not scared that I'm going to die. I think of how I'm going to die ... I don't want to linger. That scares me a little. The idea of lingering.

"I'm going over the valley." (Dying from throat cancer, his doctor found him wandering around his room, asked him where was he going?)

If I was diagnosed with something that was fatal in the next couple of years, I can't imagine anything more terrifying. And so for me, we know a lot about technology and we know a lot about the world, but I think health is the one area where there's so much data, but it's chaotic and that it's still a big black box. So, understanding really what is going to make me healthy and what is going to allow me to live the longest life is definitely keeps me up.

I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality as I was told that I had cancer.

My brain is good, but my body is deteriorating. I probably have another two or three years. Or I can pass tomorrow, but it doesn't make a difference to me.

My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave me six months more.

It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

I want people to understand that I intend to continue living and doing all the things that I love to do up until the end. And the end is by no means rushing up on me.

My mother did not want cancer to interfere with my life, as she knew it would eventually end hers.

Success is measured in months for me. When my health fails, it will fail quickly. Tumors grow on an exponential curve.

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

My younger sister Debby had died of cancer, which started me writing - the sense of life being short. Cancer focuses your mind.

My father's death from prostate cancer in 1993 was tragic. He never complained about pain. He was a fighter. By the time he was ready to die he wasn't able to die in the way that he wanted to, which seemed an outrage to me.

You don't have free will when you have lung cancer.

My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so we ended up burying him a year to the day that he was diagnosed.

I realized not long ago that by the time I leave this Earth, no matter when it is I will have officially only spent approximately 14 years of my life where I did not have to deal with cancer.

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

My father passed from cancer in 2000; his brother died of cancer before that. My grandfather died of cancer.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

When I was a child, doctors sent my grandmother home in a wheelchair to die. Diagnosed with end-stage heart disease, she already had so much scar tissue from bypass operations that the surgeons had essentially run out of plumbing. There was nothing more to do, they said; her life was over at 65.

I've always been aware of mortality because I've always had ill health most of my life.

What is time, really? When you are diagnosed with a terminal disease like cancer or leukemia, your perception of time changes.

My consultant keeps telling me sudden death could come at any moment.