Susan Gubar > Quotes

“The title of Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night promised just that. I read it in a few hours, tranquilized by its tenderness for two widowed characters who find late-life intimacy in the simplest of ways.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“The interwoven branches of the firs droop from the weight, bendable but not brittle. I want to be just as still and somehow pliable and permanent in each moment of being alive, to ponder how transient and yet how pregnant each instant feels.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“the pedagogy of pain. I am pathetically grateful to the doctors for righting the wrong they had done.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“wish to experience a tranquil dying without whining about or withstanding death. “Like birth,” my treasured collaborator Sandra warns in Death’s Door, “death is surely by its nature undignified.” True, but with the help of hospice at home I wish to avoid being cut, drained, wired, monitored, intubated, and ventilated within the artificial life support systems of an ICU. “To die ‘naturally’ is to find a way to have a graceful death when the prognosis is terminal and further treatments are of questionable value. It is not a rejection of medical science, but rather an attempt to use the sophistication of modern medicine to treat—in a different, better way—those who are seriously ill or near death.” I”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Think of those mythic or fantastic creatures granted eternal life without eternal health and youth: the Cumaean Sibyl, for instance, or the Struldbruggs in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels. Immortal but decaying and dead to affection and curiosity, Swift’s Struldbruggs may be exempt from physical termination but their unending devolution into querulous, envious, and impotent senility can only horrify Gulliver and the reader with “the dreadful Prospect of never dying.” Death has departed from their world only to leave them miserably incapacitated in a never-dying but always degenerating afterlife. “What is truly horrible is not death but the irremissibility of existence” or “the facticity of being riveted to existence without an exit,” as the philosopher Simon Critchley puts it more abstractly. The”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“According to Philippe Ariès, “the interdiction of death in order to preserve happiness was born in the United States around the beginning of the twentieth century.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“The novelist Ian McEwan, who credits fiction with providing the possibility of “imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself,” argues that this process is “the basis of all sympathy”: “Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“If there weren’t so many damned umlauts in Pema’s last name—it is a royal pain to find the damned symbol list—she might be worth consulting and quoting, for she believes that “when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this.” Can I learn to deepen compassion by realizing that my distress is shared, that there are many other people all over the world feeling pain worse than mine?”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“I zaista, takve bolesti neprilagođenosti na fizičku i društvenu sredinu kao što su anoreksija i agorafobija pogađale su i pogađaju nesrazmerno veliki broj žena. Oboleli od anoreksije – gubitka apetita, samonametnutog gladovanja – prvenstveno su mlade devojke. Od agorafobije – straha od otvorenog ili “javnog” prostora – obično oboljevaju osobe ženskog pola, najčešće sredovečne domaćice, kao što je slučaj i sa oboljevanjem od obogaljujućeg reumatoidnog artritisa.”
― Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-century Literacy Imagination

“While reading, I am moved by cadences and vocabularies, values and contexts tangential to or beyond me, but somehow pertinent to how I might begin to apprehend myself and the world differently or how foreign worlds I never encountered or even imagined might catch my attention and sweep me up in their sustained asymmetries.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“That night (as on all nights), when the lights get turned out, Don and I lie on our backs side by side with his left hand cradling my right. “I worry that this sickness is taking over your life, Bear,” I murmur in the dark now permeated by a bathroom nightlight he has just affixed. “I have no other life,” he responds while gently stroking my fingers. “I don’t know what to hope for,” I whisper. “Let’s hope for a good summer,” he says.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Marie de Hennezel, a French psychologist who works with the terminally ill, believes that “the person who can say to someone else ‘I am going to die’ does not become the victim of death but, rather, the protagonist in his or her own dying.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“The shock of a sudden death, Joan Didion attests, is “obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“The experts agree with them about the importance of the quality of the debulking: “there is absolutely nothing the doctor can influence, including choosing the type of chemotherapy, that affects a woman’s chance of surviving her ovarian cancer as much as the quality of her initial surgery . . . Sadly, however, only between 30 and 50 percent of the women with ovarian cancer in any given geographic region will have optimal surgery.” I”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“one should refrain from attributing the cause of disease to the diseased.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“I will love you beyond my death. I will love you from another space that you will palpably feel, and feel to be me loving you.” Albeit confused, that declaration seemed to speak of the intense emotions sustained by the urgent desire to continue loving the beloved until and after death. I want to live as long as the people I love live. We will live so long as the people we love remember we love them.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Remission is a word that signifies absolution. As Google will guess if you begin typing it, the term “remission of cancer” derives from and echoes “the remission of sins.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Knowledge clinched or confirmed always feels like a coin falling into the right slot, a ball landing in a basket, a peg knocked into its proper hole.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“I want the quiet concentration of each everyday task to fill me with an active love of living and a passive acceptance of dying,”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Terry Tempest Williams: “I look at Mother and I see myself,” she writes during her period of caretaking; or worse: “A person with cancer dies in increments, and a part of you slowly dies with them.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“In my absence, who would cherish Molly and Simone with my ferocity and unconditional adoration of who they are, no matter what they do or become? Who would be their biggest fan?”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“parting looms imminent as death takes dominion over that place in the body framed and famed for giving birth to life. Despite my antipathies toward current treatments, all are designed to make death delay its dominion over the center of the body.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“my central motive consists of a fierce belief that something must be done to rectify the miserable inadequacies of current medical responses to ovarian cancer.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“According to the doctor-historian Ann Dally, “Virchow, probably the greatest pathologist of the nineteenth century, wrote, ‘Woman is a pair of ovaries with a human being attached; whereas man is a human being furnished with a pair of testes.’ ” The French physician Achille Chereau argued that “it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Nancy Mairs, a contemporary thinker about disability and dying, wrests with “the psychological ‘undeadness’ of the dead—a consolatory consciousness of the beloved as present though elsewhere.” Such a conviction reflects faith in death as the end of personal consciousness but the beginning of a translation “into an existence no less authentic for my inability to read it.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Why I can report on a computer keyboard what I cannot bear to say aloud remains a mystery to me, but so it goes. Maybe my inability to speak propelled the obsessive reading and writing.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“As a monopoly, Myriad could set unreasonable prices and limit accessibility of services by denying certain types of insurance. Though genetic patents are being debated in the courts today, the profit motive continues to curtail available responses.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“Yet intimations of mortality whispered something else in my ear—namely, that I will love my family and friends until death departs, and since death will never depart, I will love them always and forever.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

“That Robinson’s character eases her grief by reading speaks to me of the importance of reading. In stories, we contemplate others like and unlike ourselves, confronting situations we might also face, but differently. As we consider creatures whose background and problems and values differ from our own, we identify and sympathize and see ourselves anew. Empathy for those who are not-us humanizes us. Whether or not it translates into compassionate behavior, it stretches the boundaries of our being. We each of us expand to contain multitudes.”
― Susan Gubar, Late-Life Love

“The words of Corinne Boyer, a Canadian woman who died of ovarian cancer a decade ago, complement the patchwork of sentiments expressed by many of the others I studied: “Is this my protest against what is happening to me? No—it is a protest about what is happening to all women. Or, more exactly, what is not happening for them. I am reconciled for myself, and anticipate the entirely spiritual life that awaits me. What I was not reconciled to—nor should anyone be—is the injustice to women in allocating such a paltry medical research budget to illnesses that are specific to women.”
― Susan Gubar, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer