101 Inspiring Quotes About Cancer

In the journey through life, few challenges test the human spirit quite like cancer. Whether it touches your own life or that of a loved one, the path is often fraught with uncertainty, fear, and resilience. In times of struggle, words can offer solace, strength, and inspiration. The right quote can serve as a beacon of hope, reminding us of the courage and fortitude within us all. We’ve curated a collection of the top 101 inspiring quotes about cancer, designed to uplift spirits, ignite determination, and foster a sense of community and understanding for those touched by this pervasive illness. Dive into this compilation to find words that resonate, inspire change, and celebrate the indomitable spirit of those facing cancer.

1. “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.” - Audre Lorde

2. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” - Lance Armstrong Sally Jenkins

3. “You can see a person's whole life in the cancer they get.” - Haruki Murakami

4. “If it's possible to send a message from heaven, I'll get one to you.” - Lurlene McDaniel

5. “It's like they say about soldiers coming back from war. People all around you are dying. Really dying, Eric. You go in for a week's chemotherapy and you're in a ward with people who are really, actually dying, there and then and doing their best to come to terms with it. When the week's up, you go home and you see your family and your friends and everything's normal and familiar. It's too much. You think - one world can't possibly hold both these lives and you feel like you're going to go crazy when you realise the world is that big and it can fill with the most terrible things whenever it wants to.” - Steven Hall

6. “All i have to offer is this: i hold a valid driver's license and I know the way to the hospital. I can hang curtains, flip a mattress, load a dishwasher. I can deliver a pizza, lend a steadying arm, laugh at a morbid joke and compliment a bad wig and I know the metric system. I doubt that's gonna be enough.” - Brian Fies

7. “In ten years time I’ll be… (dead) sixty.” - Neil Gaiman

8. “This is the story of how Dad lived with his lung cancer. But it is much more. Through his illness and the miracles we experienced, I came to see that Dad's was not just a journey. It was a journey home. Home to God. ” - Joseph M. Hanneman

9. “The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care.I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, I wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking, and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, 'But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven.' If so, I was going to reply, 'You know what? You're right. Fine.'I believed, too, in the doctors and the medicine and the surgeries--I believed in that. I believed in them. A person like Dr. Einhorn [his oncologist], that's someone to believe in, I thought, a person with the mind to develop an experimental treatment 20 years ago that now could save my life. I believed in the hard currency of his intelligence and his research.Beyond that, I had no idea where to draw the line between spiritual belief and science. But I knew this much: I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe--what other choice was there? We do it every day, I realized. We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery.To continue believing in yourself, believing in the doctors, believing in the treatment, believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing, I decided. It had to be.Without belief, we would be left with nothing but an overwhelming doom, every single day. And it will beat you. I didn't fully see, until the cancer, how we fight every day against the creeping negatives of the world, how we struggle daily against the slow lapping of cynicism. Dispiritedness and disappointment, these were the real perils of life, not some sudden illness or cataclysmic millennium doomsday. I knew now why people fear cancer: because it is a slow and inevitable death, it is the very definition of cynicism and loss of spirit.So, I believed.” - Lance Armstrong

10. “PRAISE FOR 'THE JOURNEY HOME'Many saints are known and praised by all. We pray to them in litanies and celebrate their feast days. But the vast majority of holy men and women live heroic lives quietly before God. Loyal to family, lovers of God, servants in the Church, these unsung saints live everyday life as an example for us. David Hanneman is one such man. His story is exemplary and should be told to the world. He not only lived a noble life, but also suffered with heroism and grace as he passed into glory. This is a story to encourage and bless us all. We are thankful to Joseph Hanneman for sharing his father and making his story known to us who need such examples to encourage us as we face the difficulties and challenges of life.” - Stephen K. Ray

11. “Imagine that the world had created a new 'dream product' to feed and immunize everyone born on earth. Imagine also that it was available everywhere, required no storage or delivery, and helped mothers plan their families and reduce the risk of cancer. Then imagine that the world refused to use it.” - Frank Oski

12. “Humanity is the cancer of nature.” - Dave Foreman

13. “Everest attempt at sixty-two, three weeks after undergoing surgery for kidney cancer, marathon des Sables six months after it was amputated fingers and toes, be measured by the diagonal of Fools four weeks after ablation of a metastasis to the lung, is this possible? Cancer does not stop your life, giving up your dreams or your goals, it is simply a parameter to manage, no more, no less than all the other parameters of life.How to ensure that the disease becomes transparent to you and your entourage, almost insignificant in terms of trip you want to accomplish? This is precisely the question that Gerard Bourrat tries to answer in this book. To make a sports performance, to live with her cancer, to live well with amputations, the path is always the same: a goal, the joy of effort, perseverance and faith.This book does not commit you to climb Everest, to run under a blazing sun, walking thousands of miles, it invites you to conquer your own Everest.” - Gérard Bourrat

14. “It ought to be an offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is almost morally obliged to enthuse.” - Christopher Hitchens

15. “It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house.It's really, really true.A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream.” - Jenny Downham

16. “Death straps me to the hospital bed, claws its way onto my chest and sits there.I didn't know it would hurt this much. I didn't know that everything good that's ever happened in my life would be emptied out by it.” - Jenny Downham

17. “Do I fear death? No, I am not afraid of being dead because there's nothing to be afraid of, I won't know it. I fear dying, of dying I feel a sense of waste about it and I fear a sordid death, where I am incapacitated or imbecilic at the end which isn't something to be afraid of, it's something to be terrified of.” - Christopher Hitchens

18. “Saw a film on cancer yesterday, shown by the English delegation. No doubt about it. I'm right. "Migratory cancer cells" are amoebic formations. They are produced from disintegrating tissue and thus demonstrate the law of tension and charge in its purest form - as does the orgastic convulsion. Now money is a must - cancer the main issue - in every respect, even political.It was a staggering experience. My intuition is good. I depend on it. Was absolutely driven to buy a microscope. The sight of the cancer cells was exactly as I had previously imagined it, had almost physically felt it would be. Cancer is an autoinfection of the body, of an organ. And researchers have no idea of what, hor, or where!!” - Wilhelm Reich

19. “The best way to deal with 'Change' is to lead it!” - Clifford L Feightner

20. “It's all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.''Why are you saying that?''She might need permission to die, Cal.''I don't want her to. She doesn't have my permission.” - Jenny Downham

21. “Maybe you should say goodbye, Cal.''No.''It might be important.''It might make her die.” - Jenny Downham

22. “Cure the symptoms, cure the disease.” - Michael Critchton

23. “I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you've bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch 'em carry it off, and you don't care. That's more like how it was.” - Jane Smiley

24. “Because that's what unfaithfulness is, isn't it? A cancer that's always there in the back of your mind, eating away at the foundations of the relationship.” - Matt Dunn

25. “Fear is the cancer” - Simon Holt

26. “Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.” - Natalie Palmer

27. “You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer.""Did he show you slides?"We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.” - Philip K. Dick

28. “Bravery is a willing decision to do what must be done. Fear is a cancer that is cured only by doing what must be done, backed by an intelligent, open mind.” - Corey Aaron Burkes

29. “We all have the best laid plans for our children, and they go and ruin it all by growing up any way they want to. What the hell was it all for, then? (Real Life and Liars)” - Kristina Riggle

30. “Today we fight. Tomorrow we fight. The day after, we fight. And if this disease plans on whipping us, it better bring a lunch, 'cause it's gonna have a long day doing it.” - Jim Beaver

31. “Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.” - John Green

32. “There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.” - John Green

33. “I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)” - John Green

34. “I'm not afraid of being dead. I'm just afraid of what you might have to go through to get there.” - Pamela Bone

35. “Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.” - Pablo Neruda

36. “Cancer seems a high price to pay for an innocuous-looking habit. You get into smoking and you are robbed of the last 25 years of your life. Some cocky souls will say, 'Ah yes, but they are the worst 25 years.' Nobody feels like that in a cancer ward. There are no cocky souls in a cancer ward. But there's a lot of pain, not just of the excruciating physical kind that they shoot you full of morphine to smother. There are a lot of tears. All round. It is hard to say goodbye to the people you love. And it's scary. Cancer wards have a way of knocking the cockiness out of you. And for what? Another cigarette?” - Tony Parsons

37. “Man, it was a good thing vampires didn't get cancer. Lately he'd been chain-smoking like a felon.” - J.R. Ward

38. “One day, when I thought I was alone, I prayed in church. While making this offering before the cross, a parishioner came up to me, put her arm around my shoulder and prayed, ‘Dear God, please heal Father Jim. And give me his cancer.’ I was incredulous. I looked at her, and then back to the Lord and quietly prayed, ‘If she insists, Lord, hear our prayer!’ Later I was able to pray, ‘Lord, rather than give my cancer to her, give her heart of love to me – the love that prompted her to deny her very self and pray in such a loving way.” - Jim Willig

39. “I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.” - John Green

40. “You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.” - William Saroyan

41. “It was Disney World fused with Cancerland.” - Siddhartha Mukherjee

42. “Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.” - Jodi Picoult

43. “Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.” - John Green

44. “There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.” - John Green

45. “Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.” - John Green

46. “50,000-63,000 individuals in the United States and 19,000-25,000 in the UK die prematurely from cancer annually due to insufficient vitamin D.” - John Cannell, MD

47. “I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.” - John Green

48. “If I keep grinning maybe my inoperable colon cancer won't hurt so much.” - Tony Millionaire

49. “I don't think you're dying," I said. "I think you've just got a touch of cancer.He smiled. Gallows humor.” - John Green

50. “The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.” - Andreas Moritz

51. “I think unconsciously I was afraid that if she asked me how I felt, my unleashed grief and rage would kill us all. In some unadmitted corner of myself I was already weeping and screaming and begging her not to leave me, not to go. If I started crying for real, only her comfort could make me stop, and if she died before she had finished comforting me, then I would be left to cry forever.” - Jean Hegland

52. “And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.” - Chuck Klosterman

53. “She had six months at most left to live. She had cancer, she hissed. A filthy growth eating her insides away. There was an operation, she'd been told. They took half your stomach out and fitted you up with a plastic bag. Better a semicolon than a full stop, some might say.” - Helen Hodgman

54. “Yes?’ he asked, looking at me over the sheet.‘I’m a writer temporarily down on my inspirations.’‘Oh, a writer, eh?’‘Yes.’‘Are you sure?’‘No, I’m not.’‘What do you write?’‘Short stories mostly. And I’m halfway through a novel.’‘A novel, eh?’‘Yes.’‘What’s the name of it?’‘”The Leaky Faucet of My Doom.”‘‘Oh, I like that. What’s it about?’‘Everything.’‘Everything? You mean, for instance, it’s about cancer?’‘Yes.’‘How about my wife?’‘She’s in there too.” - Charles Bukowski

55. “The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer” - Dan Simmons

56. “You cannot conceive of the depths of my sorrow, Campbell Maria Cooper." Alicia brought her fist to her mouth and her other hand to the rail of the bed and took a deep breath before she continued. "I will never be the same when you are gone. Things for me will be dim and gray and flat. But there is one thing that will keep me going, Campbell, and that is the belief in my connection to you. This thing. This crazy enmeshed love feeling that I have is real. Like this cup is real. Or this phone is real. And it will not just go away when you do. Okay? Wherever you are going, you will be connected to me by this thing, and you will never, ever be alone, okay? I want you to know that.” - Wendy Wunder

57. “Even now, it's still hard for him to say it. I don't blame him. It's an icky word. Why couldn't whoever was in charge of naming things call cancer 'sugar' and sugar, 'cancer'? People might not eat so much of the stuff then. And it's so much more pleasant to die of sugar.” - Sarah Wylie

58. “[If you hear a] story about how eating sausage leads to anal cancer, you will be skeptical, because it has never happened to anyone you know, and sausage, after all, is delicious.” - David McRaney

59. “A sense of entitlement is a cancerous thought process that is void of gratitude and can be deadly to our relationships.” - Steve Maraboli

60. “We Let the Boat DriftI set out for the pond, crossing the ravine where seedling pines start up like sparks between the disused rails of the Boston and Maine.The grass in the field would make a second crop if early autumn rains hadn't washed the goodness out. After the night's hard frost it makes a brittle rustling as I walk.The water is utterly still. Here and therea black twig sticks up. It's five years today, and even now I can't accept what cancer did to him -- not death so much as the annihilation of the whole man, sense by sense, thought by thought, hope by hope.Once we talked about the life to come. I took the Bible from the nightstand and offered John 14: "I go to prepare a place for you.""Fine. Good," he said. "But what about Matthew? 'You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" And he wept.My neighbor honks and waves driving by. She counsels troubled students; keeps bees; her goats follow her to the mailbox.Last Sunday afternoon we went canoeing on the pond. Something terrible at school had shaken her. We talked quietly far from shore. The paddlesrested across our laps; glittering dropsfell randomly from their tips. The lightaround us seemed alive. A loon-itinerant-let us get quite close before it dove, coming upafter a long time, and well away from humankind” - Jane Kenyon

61. “Each of us carries a sleeping tiger inside, and we can’t predict when that cat will wake, stretch, and sharpen its claws.” - Holly Robinson

62. “Let me tell you something, my wife died for Tuesdays ago. Cancer of the colon. We were married forty-one years. Now you stop feeling sorry for yourself and lose some of that pork of yours. Pretty girl like you - you don't want to do this yourself.” - Wally Lamb

63. “Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.” - John Green

64. “If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.” - John Green

65. “I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.” - John Green

66. “It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace...” - John Green

67. “Някой може да ти е приятел,но е възможно никога да не си прекрачвал бариерата на десетте сантиметра между вас,никога да не си го прегръщал продължително,да не си го виждал никога как се събужда.” - Albert Espinosa

68. “Awareness Makes a Cure Possible.” - Sydney Davies

69. “Nu. Nu ma întelegi. De ce lasa el sa existe boala si bolnavi? Din doua una:ori e rau, ori nu prea e cine stie ce de capul lui.” - Schmitt Éric-Emmanuel

70. “once ruffle-skirted vanity table where I primped at thirteen, opening drawers to a private chaos of eyeshadows lavender teal sky-blue, swarms of hair pins pony tail fasteners, stashes of powders, colonies of tiny lipsticks (p.39)” - Barbara Blatner

71. “blue-gold sky, fresh cloud, emerald-black mountain, trees on rocky ledges, on the summit, the tiny pin of a telephone tower-all brilliantly clear, in shadow and out. and on and through everything everywhere the sun shines without reservation (p. 97)” - Barbara Blatner

72. “...gripping the rim of the sink you claw your way to stand and cling there, quaking with will, on heron legs, and still the hot muck pours out of you. (p. 27)” - Barbara Blatner

73. “I could simply kill you now, get it over with, who would know the difference? I could easily kick you in, stove you under, for all those times, mean on gin, you rammed words into my belly. (p. 52)” - Barbara Blatner

74. “oh. she heard it too-no waters coursing, canyon empty, sun soundless- and the beast your life nowhere hiding (p. 103)” - Barbara Blatner

75. “Each appointment brought fear, uncertainty and discouragement. Ann’s constant concern was, What if I have cancer?” - K. Howard Joslin

76. “Ann prayed because of a gut-wrenching, throbbing pain in her soul. She urgently begged the Lord for her life.” - K. Howard Joslin

77. “DeeDee had to have a firm grasp on reality. Yet she knew God was bigger than a pathology report. So she prayed.” - K. Howard Joslin

78. “God had not abandoned us. He was actively working behind the scenes, when I had no means or spirit to fight.” - K. Howard Joslin

79. “God dramatically slew one monstrous opponent and then threw us into the arena against a stronger and more vicious foe.” - K. Howard Joslin

80. “I have no guarantee that God will choose to heal Ann, but I know he wants me to pray to that end.” - K. Howard Joslin

81. “once,a boy told a girl : i will stay with you forever, little did she know that his forever is only three months because..he died of cancer!” - - AMAL SAGHEER

82. “I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way.” - Christina Carson

83. “Rather than you smoking a cigarette, the cigarette is really smoking you.” - Anthony Liccione

84. “I have cancer. Cancer doesn't have me.” - Marco Calderon

85. “But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.” - John Green

86. “Although often perceived as one disease, cancer is a number of diseases subsumed within one diagnostic label.” - Mary Burton

87. “She did not begin to tell real lies until Rosa was in hospital suffering that filthy rot that left her all eaten out inside, as light and fragile as a pine log infested with white ant” - Peter Carey

88. “This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.” - John Green

89. “Maybe I was supposed to hate Caroline Mathers or something because she’d been with Augustus, but I didn’t. I couldn’t see her very clearly amid all the tributes, but there didn’t seem to be much to hate. She seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.” - John Green

90. “But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.” - John Green

91. “My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war with a predetermined winner” - John Green

92. “You die in the middle of your life.” - John Green

93. “She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.” - Richard Ford

94. “Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.” - Barbara Ehrenreich

95. “The Hegemony had known how to treat cancer, but most of the gene-tailoring knowledge and technology had been lost after the Fall.” - Dan Simmons

96. “God didn’t design your life so you would constantly fall down, but he does hope that you will be brought to your knees.” - Shannon L. Alder

97. “I am not afraid to die; I am only afraid of saying goodbye to you forever.” - Shannon L. Alder

98. “A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made of truth, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the information may have gone wrong. It is passed on and on until some brave soul questions its validity; that brave soul refuses to bite the apple and let the apple eat him. Forced to start from scratch for the sake of purity and truth, that brave soul, figuratively speaking, fully amputates the information in order to protect his personal judgment. In other words, his ignorance is to be valued more than the lie believed to be true.” - Criss Jami

99. “Cancer may have blindsided you, but it didn't blindside God.~ Strength Renewed” - Shirley Corder

100. “When one person gets cancer, the whole family gets cancer.” - Shirley Corder

101. “Help me to get my eyes off my suffering and onto you, God.” - Shirley Corder