Elizabeth Edwards

“Cancer is not a straight line. It's up and down.”

“There is nothing about resilience that I can say that my father did not first utter silently in eighteen years of living inside a two-dimensional cutout of himself.”

“I was an English major in college, and then I went to graduate school in English at the University of North Carolina for three years.”

“It's just a part of our nature to hope.”

“Sometimes you get politicians who dig their feet into the sand and aren't willing to listen to another voice.”

“I've had to come to grips with a God that fits my own experience, which is, my God could not be offering protection and not have protected my boy.”

“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it's less good than the one you had before.”

“I think that we're foolhardy to not be engaging in federal funding of stem-cell research in the most aggressive way we possibly can.”

“My job is to stay alive until the medicine and research catch up.”

“I have less energy than I did when I was a younger parent, although I was never really a young parent.”

“I don't expect to get yesterday's medicine. If I can help it, I'd like to get tomorrow's medicine.”

“Concentrate on the things that matter to you.”

“I think self-knowledge is the rarest trait in a human being.”

“In a sense, having cancer takes you by the shoulders and shakes you.”

“I'm a puzzle doer.”

“One of the things that I think you see sometimes in politics is a certain degree of caution. It's usually advised by consultants who don't want to see you march to the end of a limb.”

“A lot of sad stories in a row - that wears on you.”

“I want to live.”

“You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces - my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope. These graces have carried me through difficult times and they have brought more joy to the good times than I ever could have imagined.”

“By what you do, you teach your children how to respond to difficult information.”