Richard Hofstadter Quotes

When someone gets sick, it is easy to get walked all over, walk all over people, and be so beat down you agree to things you would never normally agree to.

When you walk through the hospital, you waiver between feeling bad for everyone else and feeling bad for yourself. It's a war of the worlds - the healthy and the sick.

I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill treatment, indignities, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, and the wretchedness of the vanquished.

If family or friends are unwell or ill - it's perhaps the only thing that really can make one feel vulnerable.

If originally it was not good for a man to be alone, it is much worse for a sick man to be so; he thinks too much of his distemper, and magnifies it.

There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

Life is an incurable disease.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.

There's nothing more raw in life than when you're sick.

I was a hundred-percent sick, I felt as if I had no further use for my legs, they just hung over the edge of my bed like unimportant and rather ridiculous objects.

Pain? He could handle that, no problem; it was the idea that the female he loved was suffering that made him want to either punch something or vomit in the corner.

There is hurt that cannot be fixed by band aids or poetrybecause no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Sara: "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you." To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. "No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.

if you don't get sick, you won't get well.

We're all of us equally naked before the jaws of pain.

The fact that we are living does not mean we are not sick.

I’d always been afraid of sick people, and so had my mother. It wasn’t that we feared catching their brain aneurysm or accidentally ripping out their IV. I think it was their fortitude that frightened us. Sick people reminded us not of what we had, but of what we lacked. Everything we said sounded petty and insignificant; our complaints paled in the face of theirs, and without our complaints, there was nothing to say.

Lord, help us to recognize you in the sick, poor and suffering.

How do you feel?” she asked, trying to fluff his pillow. “Other than terrible, I mean.” He moved his head slightly to the side. It seemed to be a sickly interpretation of a shrug. “Of course you’re feeling terrible,” she clarified, “but is there any change? More terrible? Less terrible?” He made no response. “The same amount of terrible?

Everybody hurts sometimes Everybody cries