Susannah Cahalan Quotes

Here am I, a human being and that has a body that is getting old. And I only have one, I can't trade it in.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not readily take himself to be a god.

I like thinking about the fragility of the human flesh and our bodies - our decay and eventual death.

There's always a race against time. I don't think for one moment that life gets better. How can it? One's body starts to fall apart.

Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

It's the decomposition that gets me. You spend your whole life looking after your body. And then you rot away.

Flesh goes on pleasuring us, and humiliating us, right to the end.

Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.

It's easy to forget people are blood and bone. They're not indestructible.

What is man but a mass of thawing clay?

There is in the soul a taste for the good, just as there is in the body an appetite for enjoyment.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.

Nothing feebler than a man does the earth raise up, of all the things which breathe and move on the earth, for he believes that he will never suffer evil in the future, as long as the gods give him success and he flourishes in his strength; but when the blessed gods bring sorrows too to pass, even these he bears, against his will, with steadfast spirit, for the thoughts of earthly men are like the day which the father of gods and men brings upon them.

What a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!

it ultimately doesn't matter which disease gnaws away at the body - it looks the same. The flesh surrenders, grows exhausted, and the eyes ask why.

Surely mortal man is a broomstick!

Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. . . . You've got to ignore the one big truth - life is fatal.

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

It's too bad that our bodies wear out while our interests are just as strong as ever.

Man is born for uprightness. If a man lose his uprightness and yet live, his escape from death is mere good fortune.

How small we humans are. All our scrambling around, trying to buttress ourselves against death. All our efforts to insulate ourselves against uncertainty with codes of behavior and meaningless busyness.

I clearly saw the skeleton underneath all this show of personality what is left of a man and all his pride but bones?

We are fastened to a dying animal.

It is the way of mortals. They fling themselves at life and emerge broken.