Jennifer Bartlett

"I can’t write myself except through reading others’ words."

"Why would anyone write about illness except the ill? And at first, too, the experience is too close for the ill person to be a reliable witness. The mind doesn’t want to write about the body’s condition but to change it, for in dreams the body can still dance!"

"Friends change toward the ill person, some revealed in their strange and beautiful kindness and some exposed in their utter, ugly selfishness."

"It’s curious that the Latin root of the Middle English word for tradition, tradere, means not only to “impart” and “give over,” but also to “betray."

"a world in which the hospital industrial complex makes “obsolete” different bodies"