“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)
“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)
“The land of the sick was no place for anyone to live 24/7; I would never have wished it upon my worst enemy. I knew that if I wanted our relationship to last, I would need to encourage Will to start living his life again.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 92)
“Time was a waiting room—waiting for doctors, waiting for blood transfusions and test results, waiting for better days. I tried to focus on the preciousness of the present: the moments when I was well enough to walk around the oncology unit with my parents, the sound of Will’s voice as he read out loud to me each night before bed, the weekends when my brother came to visit from college—all of us together now, while it was still possible. But try as I might, I couldn’t help but feel an incipient grief and guilt as my thoughts turned, inevitably, to what would happen to Will and my family if I didn’t survive.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 91)
“Living with a life-threatening illness turned me into a second-class citizen in the land of time. My days were a slow emergency, my life dwindling to four white walls, a hospital bed, and fluorescent lights, my body punctured by tubes and wires tethering me to various monitors and my IV pole. The world outside my window seemed farther and farther away, my field of vision shrinking to a tiny pinpoint.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 91)
“Over time, I grew allergic to the looks of pity and the positivity pushers who tried to cheer me up with their get-well cards and their exhausting refrains of ‘stay strong’ and ‘keep fighting.’ I began to feel angry at people’s trivial complaints about a stressful day at the office or a broken toe that meant they couldn’t go to the gym for a couple of weeks, and it was hard not to feel left out when my friends told me about a concert or a party they’d been to together.”
Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms (Page 76)
Between Two Kingdoms [Book]
![Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad [Book]](https://movemequotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/kingdoms.jpeg)
Book Overview: A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
Post(s) Inspired by this Book:
“When the child is ill, take care of his body but don’t pay too much attention. It is dangerous, because if illness and your attention become associated… which is bound to happen if it is repeated again and again. Whenever the child is ill he becomes the center of the whole family: daddy comes and sits by his side and inquires about his health, and the doctor comes, and the neighbors start coming, and friends inquire, and people bring presents for him… Now he can become too much attached to all this; it can be so nourishing to his ego that he may not like to be well again. And if this happens, then it is impossible to be healthy. No medicine can help now. The person has become decisively committed to illness. And that’s what has happened to many people, the majority.”
Osho, Courage (Page 96)
Chadwick Boseman Quote on Struggles and How they Shape You For Your Purpose
“The struggles along the way are only meant to shape you for your purpose.”
Chadwick Boseman
Beyond the Quote (239/365)
Chadwick Boseman, the iconic “Black Panther” star, has died at age 43 after a 4-year battle with colon cancer. He was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer in 2016, battled it until it progressed to stage IV, and up until it ended up taking his life here in 2020. And like so many others, I knew nothing about his cancer or that he was even sick at all.
Read More »Chadwick Boseman Quote on Struggles and How they Shape You For Your Purpose“Illness is not the problem. You are the problem—as long as the egoic mind is in control. When you are ill or disabled, do not feel that you have failed in some way, do not feel guilty. Do not blame life for treating you unfairly, but do not blame yourself either. All that is resistance. If you have a major illness, use it for enlightenment. Anything ‘bad’ that happens in your life—use it for enlightenment. Withdraw time from the illness. Do not give it any past or future. Let it force you into intense present-moment awareness—and see what happens. Become an alchemist. Transmute base metal into gold, suffering into consciousness, disaster into enlightenment.”
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Page 218)
28 Beautiful Claire Wineland Quotes on Life, Death, and Living with Challenges
Excerpt: While Cystic Fibrosis ultimately took her life, Claire never let CF stop her from living her best life. Read our 28 Claire Wineland Quotes on life, death, and living with challenges.
Read More »28 Beautiful Claire Wineland Quotes on Life, Death, and Living with Challenges
“I was dying. And I couldn’t gain any kind of control on the situation. There was no, ‘mind over matter-ing’ it for me. My lungs were failing. And I got hit with this huge wave of grief. Which is not something that I had expected. As someone who had always known that I would die young—and I had always accepted that and been okay with that—I was expecting maybe some fear, maybe some hesitation, maybe to turn into a 5-year-old then cry and want my mom… But I wasn’t expecting grief. And what I felt grief for wasn’t the fact that I was dying, it wasn’t about fear of the unknown, it was none of that. I felt grief for the life I could’ve lived. I felt grief for life itself. For all of the possibilities that it held. And I was mad at myself. I spent, literally, 30 minutes as my CO2 levels were rising and I slowly started to hallucinate, being thoroughly pissed at myself for waiting around for the world to tell me I was okay even though I was sick. For waiting around for someone to tell me that I was healthy enough, that I was better enough, I was good enough to live a life that I wanted to live. I wish that I yelled at every single person that had come into the room and said that they were sorry for me.” ~ Claire Wineland (20), EEM LA 2018
“When you spend a lot of time in a hospital and you know a lot of other people with your condition you start to see patterns emerge in the way that they take care of themselves. I saw these two different extremes: There were these patients who did not give any sh*ts and just never did their treatments, were completely un-compliant, would hide under their covers and not talk to any of the doctors, and were pretty much just giving a giant, “F U” to life — and then there were the patients who were overly compliant, that were perfect with their treatments, that were perfect with their health care, and wanted so desperately to be a good patient. And I saw both of these extremes fail. I saw people who spent every single waking hour of the day focusing on their health and trying to get better and I saw them pass away before I did. I saw them pass away without having become anything more than just a patient. I saw them pass away without having made anything in the world that they were proud of. And of course the other end didn’t work either because they happened to die as well. So I was trying to find some kind of balance. If I only lived to get better, if I only lived for fixing myself, for getting healthy—then what was I actually contributing to the world?” ~ Claire Wineland (20), EEM LA 2018
“We look at people who are sick and we pity them because we believe that their lives has to be inherently less joyous than everyone else’s. What we don’t see, is that when people suffer, when people feel pain, it’s just connecting them to life. It’s connecting them to everyone else. Because the truth is, no matter what kind of life you’re living, no matter what kind of circumstance you’re in, you’re going to feel miserable sometimes; You’re going to have nights when you feel like the entire world is closing in on you, and it’s never going to be okay again, and you’re always going to be alone—and you’re going to have days when you feel so happy to be alive; where you feel joyous and you feel inspired… And you are always going to feel all of that. No matter if all of your dreams come true, and you’re living in that New York loft apartment, doing whatever you’ve ever wanted to do, and are in love and married and what not—you’re still going to feel the complexity of life. Because life doesn’t discriminate between circumstance. Life is not going to stop unfolding itself to you just because you’re sick or because your life isn’t how you think it’s supposed to be. There is still going to be beauty.” ~ Claire Wineland, Klick MUSE New York
“A lot of motivational speakers will tell you that the point of life is to be happy… I think that’s bullsh*t. I think that happiness is an emotion—it’s some dopamine firing in your brain and it’s great and it’s awesome when it happens. But we can’t chase happiness—we have to chase deep satisfaction and pride—and there’s a difference. And the way that we do that is not by running away from our pain or sickness, it’s by being sick and saying, ‘So what?'” ~ Claire Wineland (19), Zappos All Hands Meeting
“One of the most painful things about being a human being, in my opinion, is when you feel like you’re not of use to anyone and you have nothing it give. It’s heartbreaking. And a lot of people who are sick, feel that way because just taking care of themselves takes up so much of their time.” ~ Claire Wineland, Relatable
“We teach sick people that when they are sick, somehow, someway, they cannot be as happy as normal, healthy people. We teach them that their happiness, their contentment in life, their joy in life, is tied to how healthy they are.” ~ Claire Wineland, Klick MUSE New York
“How do we make it so that when someone is born with a chronic illness, someone who is going to be sick, who might always be sick—who might die sick—can still live a life that they are proud of? How do we teach kids who are sick, teach people who are sick in general, to not feel ashamed of their illness or their experience of life, but to learn from it and to make something from it?” ~ Claire Wineland (20), EEM LA 2018