Top 60 Suleika Jaouad Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.”

— Suleika Jaouad

2. “Love the people around you. Love the life you have. I can’t think of a more powerful response to life’s sorrows than loving.”

— Suleika Jaouad

3. “To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing- this is my constant work.”

— Suleika Jaouad

4. “EVERYONE WHO IS born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

— Suleika Jaouad

5. “We were learning that sometimes the only way to endure suffering is to transform it into art.”

— Suleika Jaouad

6. “He 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.” This advice, more than any, stays with me.”

— Suleika Jaouad

7. “This is the cruel irony of medicine: Sometimes the treatments you receive to get better make you worse in the long run, requiring further care, exposing you to yet more complications and side effects. It is a maddening cycle.”

— Suleika Jaouad

8. “Time was a waiting room – waiting for doctors, waiting for blood transfusions and test results, waiting for better days.”

— Suleika Jaouad

9. “They say that in difficult times you find out who your friends are, but mostly I found out whom I wanted to befriend.”

— Suleika Jaouad

10. “After you’ve had the ceiling cave in on you – whether through illness or some other catastrophe – you don’t assume structural stability. You must learn to live on fault lines.”

— Suleika Jaouad

11. “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.”

— Suleika Jaouad

12. “I don’t know what will come of my relationship with Jon or if I will ever see Max again, but I no longer want to protect my heart. 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 Jaouad

13. “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. I’ve prided myself on being a good friend in tough times – on being capable of sitting with hard things and going above what is required to be there for someone as they near the knife’s edge.”

— Suleika Jaouad

14. “Wherever I am, wherever we go, home will always be the in-between place, a wilderness I’ve grown to love.”

— Suleika Jaouad

15. “They taught me that, 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

16. “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

17. “There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. 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

18. “But for as long as I’ve known him, Jon has been teaching me that sometimes all you can do is show up. And when things are hard, to keep on showing up.”

— Suleika Jaouad

19. “Grief isn’t meant to be silenced,” she says, “to live in the body and be carried alone.”

— Suleika Jaouad

20. “Trauma has a way of dividing your view of the world into two camps: those who get it and those who don’t.”

— Suleika Jaouad

21. “Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.”

— Suleika Jaouad

22. “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

23. “You must learn to live on fault lines.”

— Suleika Jaouad

24. “Imagining a future is a frightening exercise when your life has been upended; it requires hope, which feels risky, even dangerous.”

— Suleika Jaouad

25. “Up until this moment, with the exception of the mouth sores, my illness had been largely invisible. On some level, I was starting to realize that the life I’d had before was shattered – the person I’d been, buried. I would never be the same.”

— Suleika Jaouad

26. “Living with a life-threatening illness turned me into a second-class citizen in the land of time.”

— Suleika Jaouad

27. “Perhaps the greatest test of love is the way we act in times of need.”

— Suleika Jaouad

28. “That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is,” Jeanette Winterson wrote. “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

— Suleika Jaouad

29. “I would not take back what I suffered to gain this.”

— Suleika Jaouad

30. “I stopped writing in my journal after that. I grew resigned to the idea that, for the time being, I had one central preoccupation: ongoingness.”

— Suleika Jaouad

31. “The tangling of so much cruelty and beauty has made of my life a strange, discordant landscape. It has left me with an awareness that haunts the edges of my vision – it can all be lost in a moment – but it’s also given me a jeweler’s eye. If I’m thinking about my illness – abstracted from its impact on the people around me – then the answer is: No, I would not reverse my diagnosis if I could. I would not take back what I suffered to gain this.”

— Suleika Jaouad

32. “When you survive something that was thought to be unsurvivable, the obvious is gained. You have your life – you have time. But it’s only when you get there that you realize your survival has come at a cost.”

— Suleika Jaouad

33. “They strike me as proof that home doesn’t need to be a place or a profession, that I might find it wherever I go.”

— Suleika Jaouad

34. “We are born needing care and we die needing care, but it was hard for me to accept how helpless.”

— Suleika Jaouad

35. “The caregiver’s life is ultimately dictated by the cycle of decay and demands of someone else’s body.”

— Suleika Jaouad

36. “You are a young woman, I am an old man. You are looking ahead, I am looking back. It is likely that we have only our mortality in common, he wrote. Meaning is not found in the material realm – dinner, jazz, cocktails, conversation or whatever. Meaning is what’s left when everything else is stripped away.”

— Suleika Jaouad

37. “But what rattled me most was that my father, who always fronted as tough, sounded scared for me. It was becoming harder to believe the line I’d been fed since I was a kid: Everything is going to be all right.”

— Suleika Jaouad

38. “We grow by the obstacles we face and the wide scope of emotions we feel. That’s how we understand one another. That is how we understand ourselves.”

— Suleika Jaouad

39. “But now, I’m not so sure, because cancer does a weird thing to you. It takes who you are and what you think you know and throws that all in the trash.”

— Suleika Jaouad

40. “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 Jaouad

41. “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.”

— Suleika Jaouad

42. “If I’m thinking about my illness – abstracted from its impact on the people around me – then the answer is: No, I would not reverse my diagnosis if I could. I would not take back what I suffered to gain this.”

— Suleika Jaouad

43. “What if I stopped thinking of pain as something that needs to be numbed, fixed, dodged, and protected against? What if I tried to honor its presence in my body, to welcome it into the present?”

— Suleika Jaouad

44. “Some traumas, I learned, refuse to remain in the past, wreaking havoc in the form of triggers and flashbacks, nightmares and fits of rage, until they’ve been processed and given their proper place.”

— Suleika Jaouad

45. “I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal – survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.”

— Suleika Jaouad

46. “This is the worst pain I’ve ever been in in my entire life, and there may only be two or three hours a day when I can function. But in those two or three hours, I am Max, and it is good to be Max.”

— Suleika Jaouad

47. “Illness had made me good at separating my scripts. There were the words I kept in my head – please stop talking, don’t you see we are already so scared – and the words I actually spoke out loud: “Joanie was fortunate to have you as a nurse.”

— Suleika Jaouad

48. “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

49. “Grieving is an emotional experience as well as a physical one,” she says. “The fact that my bones broke and the cancer occurred in my gut felt symbolically appropriate.”

— Suleika Jaouad

50. “I hoped to make a difference. I wanted, in my own way, however small, to contribute something to the world. To leave more than I took.”

— Suleika Jaouad