32 Suleika Jaouad Quotes from Between Two Kingdoms on Cancer, Suffering, and Survival

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Excerpt: Suleika Jaouad’s life was devastated by cancer. Our quotes from Between Two Kingdoms will give you a raw glimpse as to how she survived.

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Introduction: F*ck Cancer

The suffering it has caused is unfathomable. It’s rare that I meet someone in today’s world who’s life hasn’t been directly impacted by cancer. And while not all cancer diagnoses are created equal, there’s one unifying factor in all of them: cancer interrupts.

It sweeps the rug out from underneath the person who is living their life according to plan (or as according to their plan as they can manage), and leaves them dizzy and on their back trying to make sense of an immediate confrontation with their own mortality.

This is what happened to Suleika Jaouad.

Right as she was finding her path in the world and was carving out a life for herself that she was excited for, cancer came into the picture and abruptly took it all away. Reading her account of going from top-of-the-world, to rock bottom, and how she “clawed” her way back to life is raw, gripping, and nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Below, you’ll find 32 of my favorite quotes from Between Two Kingdoms that will introduce you to some of the major themes of devastation, pain, suffering, love, healing, recovery, restarting, and survival that Suleika poignantly shares throughout. I hope they find you well. Emphasis added is my own. Enjoy.

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The List: 32 Suleika Jaouad Quotes from Between Two Kingdoms on Cancer, Suffering, and Survival

“For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body’s last breath.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 122)

“Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you and your anger, the crackle of exam table paper beneath bruised limbs, the way your heart pounds into your mouth when the doctor enters the room with the latest biopsy results.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 100)

“The logical mind tries to remind itself that sometimes you must suffer in order to feel better. But the body has its own memory: It remembers who hurt it. On an irrational level, I felt wronged by those whom I saw having ‘poisoned’ me (people in lab coats, phlebotomist, my mother) and by those who encouraged me to think positively about it (friends, Hallmark cards, the ‘cancer books’ section of Barnes & Noble). Finding the silver lining felt like part of the punishment.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 100)

“To quell my own fears, I needed space from theirs.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 252)

“I told everyone I was fine, when in fact I needed the privacy to fall apart.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 270)

“It took me a while to say I was a cancer patient. Then, for a long time, I was only that. It’s time for me to figure out who I am now.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 221)

“In my lowest moments, I fantasize about getting sick again. I miss the sense of purpose and clarity I felt while in treatment—the way staring your mortality straight in the eye simplifies things and reroutes your focus to what really matters. I miss the hospital’s ecosystem. Like me, everyone there was broken, but out here, among the living, I feel like an imposter, overwhelmed and unable to function.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 214)

“It is hard to rage at something as nebulous as cancer. You have to steer the trajectory of your anger, ideally toward a canvas or a notebook, before it hurdles toward a human target.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 281)

“I decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act. If the chemo sores in my mouth made it too painful to talk, I would find new ways to communicate. As long as I was stuck in bed, my imagination would become the vessel that allowed me to travel beyond the confines of my room. If my body had grown so depleted that I now had only three functional hours each day, I would clarify my priorities and make the most of how I spent the time I had.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 109)

“Melissa painted self-portraits from bed; I wrote self-portraits from bed. Watercolors and words were the drugs we preferred for our pain. We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 157)

“I’d always imagined myself as the kind of writer who would help other people tell their stories, but increasingly I found myself gravitating toward the first person. Illness had turned my gaze inward.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 107)

“People often respond to the news of tragedy with ‘words fail,’ but words did not fail me that day, or the next, or thereafter—they poured out of me, first cautiously, then exuberantly, my mind awakening as if from a long slumber, thoughts tumbling out faster than my pen could keep up.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 106)

“They say that in difficult times you find out who your friends are, but mostly I found out whom I wanted to befriend. Some people I thought I could count on disappeared, while others I barely knew did more than I ever expected.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 224)

“Untamed fear consumes you, becomes you, until what you are most afraid of turns alive.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 281)

“While it’s easy to destroy the past, it’s far more difficult to forget it.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 279)

“When life brings you to the floor, there is a choice: You can allow the worst thing that’s ever happened to you to hijack your remaining days, or you can claw your way back into motion.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 224)

“Stability for me has always been in someone’s arms, no matter how fleeting the time there. Whenever I am feeling lost or stuck, it’s been my pattern to end whatever relationship I am in and immediately find my compass in a new man. This has always been a convenient way to avoid figuring out what I want for myself or working on the problems at hand. It’s easier to fixate on a new love interest than to face what’s really at stake.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 298)

“[Rich] has a theory: When we travel, we actually take three trips. There’s the first trip of preparation and anticipation, packing and daydreaming. There’s the trip you’re actually on. And then, there’s the trip you remember. ‘The key is to try to keep all three as separate as possible,’ he says. ‘The key is to be present wherever you are right now.’”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 303)

“Odd things happen when you’re on a road trip alone. The monotony of driving becomes meditative: The mind unwrinkles. As the usual anxieties and concerns vacate, daydreams flit in. Occasionally, a wisp of an idea appears out of nowhere only to recede, a shimmery mirage in a desert. Other times, an avalanche of memories tumbles forth, loosened by an old song on the radio or a deja vu—inducing landscape. The interplay between geography and memory becomes a conversation. They spark and spur each other.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 244)

“It strikes me that the redwoods have accomplished, without effort or ego, what I have struggled so hard to do. They make existence, as I conceive of it—time measured in hundred-day increments—seem laughably naïve and nearsighted. I feel so tiny and rootless in their midst. Right now, I am no redwood. I am a speck, a spore surfing the breeze, directionless and susceptible, blown any which way, without the faintest clue about where I’ll land.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 304)

“You can’t force clarity when there is none to be had yet.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 315)

“Gazing up at the Milky Way, I remember when all I wanted is what I have in this moment. Sitting on the kitchen floor of my old apartment, sicker than I’d ever felt, my heart fractured into ten thousand tiny pieces, I needed to believe that there was a truer, more expansive and fulfilling version of my life out there. I had no interest in existing as a martyr, forever defined by the worst things that had happened to me. I needed to believe that when your life has become a cage, you can loosen the bars and reclaim your freedom. I told myself again and again, until I believed my own words: It is possible for me to alter the course of my becoming.“

Suleika Jaoaud, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 324)

“Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. Though the word may suggest otherwise, recovery is not about salvaging the old at all. It’s about accepting that you must forsake a familiar self forever, in favor of one that is being newly born. It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 234)

“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you’re at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you’ve forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 190)

“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But, I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 312)

“Moving on. It’s a phrase I obsess over: what it means, what it doesn’t how to do it for real. It seemed so easy at first, too easy, and it’s starting to dawn on me that moving on is a myth—a lie you sell yourself on when your life has become unendurable. It’s the delusion that you can build a barricade between yourself and your past—that you can ignore your pain, that you can bury your great love with a new relationship, that you are among the lucky few who get to skip over the hard work of grieving and healing and rebuilding—and that all of this, when it catches up to you, won’t come for blood.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 208)

“I’m realizing that if I am to cross the distance between near-death and renewal, instead of trying to bury my pain, I must use it as a guide to know myself better. In confronting my past, I have to reckon not only with the pain of losing other people but also with the pain I’ve caused others. I must keep seeking truths and teachers on these long, lonely stretches of highway even when—especially when—the search brings discomfort.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 283)

“At times, my heart feels so haunted that there’s no room for the living—for the possibility of new love, new loss.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 289)

“Perhaps the greatest test of love is the way we act in times of need. It is the moment of accountability that all relationships seem to arc toward.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 281)

“You can’t guarantee that people won’t hurt or betray you—they will, be it a breakup or something as big and blinding as death. But evading heartbreak is how we miss our people, our purpose. I make a pact with myself and send it off into the desert: May I be awake enough to notice when love appears and bold enough to pursue it without knowing where it will lead.“

Suleika Jaoaud, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 318)

“It’s a tricky balance, attempting to find resonance in someone’s story without reducing your suffering to sameness.”

Suleika Jaoaud, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 338)

“We are all terminal patients on this earth—the mystery is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ death appears in the plotline.”

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 119)

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If you enjoyed these quotes from Between Two Kingdoms, you’ll definitely want to read Jaouad’s book in full. It comes highly recommended: