“Please—take care of your health! Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours—so many temptations!”
Elizabeth Bishop
more infosource: letter to Robert Lowell, August 26, 1963, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 495.
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category: creativity, health, poet, writing
medium: Letter
“Now that I’m here, my greatest urge is to speak to you of dental care. My generation had a rough go dentally. Our dentists were the army dentists who came back from World War Two and believed that the dental office was a battle ground. You have a better chance at dental health. And I say this because you want at night to be pacing the floor because your fuse is burning inside of you, because you want to do your work, because you want to finish that canvas, because you want to make that design, because you want to help your fellow man. You don’t want to be pacing because you need a damn root canal. So, floss. You know, use salt and baking soda. Get them professionally cleaned if you can afford it. Take care of your damn teeth.”
Patti Smith
more infosource: Commencement speech, Pratt Institute’s, May 17, 2010.
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category: commencement speech, creativity, health, teeth
medium: Speech
“The healthiest food in the supermarket—the fresh produce—doesn’t boast about its healthfulness, because the growers don’t have the budget or the packaging. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign they have nothing valuable to say about your health.”
Michael Pollan
more infosource: Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 19.
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category: food, health, marketing, packaging, self-care, supermarket, vegetable, yam
medium: nonfiction
“I can’t die. It would ruin my image.”
Jack LaLanne
more infosource: “Jack LaLanne, Founder of Modern Fitness Movement, Dies at 96,” by Richard Goldstein, The New York Times, January 23, 2011.
category: death, health, image
medium: Obituary
“They would be resistant to it at first, because they’d think, ‘Oh, well, it’s a yoga, Jane Fonda workout.’ But if it’s done correctly, within 30 minutes, that soldier will be worn out.”
Travis Bammer
more infosource: “Army Boot Camp Embraces New-Age Fitness,” by Frank Morris, All Things Considered, NPR, December 28, 2010.
category: fitness, health, military, soldier, yoga
medium: radio news
“It’s not food if it’s called by the same name in every language. (Think Big Mac, Cheetos, or Pringles.)”
Michael Pollan
more infosource: Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 45.
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category: Big Mac, Cheetos, diet, food, health, language, Pringles, self-care, translation
medium: nonfiction
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Michael Pollan
more infosource: Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), Introduction, xv.
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category: diet, eating, food, good habit, health, meal, plants, self-care
medium: nonfiction
“Beauty is worth saving. An impractical, beautiful dirt road with a shading canopy can nourish a person’s mind and spirit, and people who are fed by the lovely aspects around them enrich the life of any town.”
Susan Hand Shetterly
more infosource: “Country Road,” in Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2010), 124.
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category: beauty, country, health, Maine, mind, nature, nourishment, preservation, road, rural
medium: nonfiction
“If people were to bring their marriages in for a checkup on an annual basis, would that provide the same sort of benefit that a physical health checkup would provide?”
James V. Córdova
more infosource: “Seeking to Pre-empt Marital Strife,” by Tara Parker-Pope, Well Blog, The New York Times, June 28, 2010.
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category: health, marriage, medicine, psychology, self-care
medium: nonfiction
“If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.”
Michael Pollan
more infosource: Food Rules (New York: Penguin, 2009), 41.
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category: advice, diet, factory, food, health, plant
medium: nonfiction
“The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.”
Cyril Connolly
more infosource: The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea Books, 1981), 25.
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category: advice, health, purpose, self-care, thin, weight
medium: nonfiction
notes: Ernest Hemingway described The Unquiet Grave as “a book which, no matter how many readers it will ever have, will never have enough.”
“I only eat food in bar form. When you concentrate food, you unleash its awesome power, I’m told.”
Homer Simpson
more infosource: “King of the Hill” [episode 9.23]
medium: television
notes: this episode was written by John Swartzwelder and directed by Steven Dean Moore
“Each patient carries his own doctor inside him. They come to us not knowing that truth. We are at our best when we give the doctor who resides within each patient a chance to go to work.”
Albert Schweitzer
more infosource: quoted by Norman Cousins in Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), paperback ed., 78.
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category: doctor, healing, health, medicine, patient
medium: nonfiction
notes: this quote is also referenced in Albert Schweitzer's Lambarene by Jo and Walter Munz (Rockland, ME: Penobscot Press, 2010): “Schweitzer found this process [of a native healing ceremony] as fascinating as I did. Indeed, we both learned to respect it as a kind of healing deeply embedded in African culture. Thus, it came as no surprise when, long after my years in Lambarene, I read about a conversation Schweitzer had with Norman Cousins, an American journalist who was editor of the Saturday Review in the 1960s. Cousins came to visit Dr. Schweitzer in Gabon and said, ‘What a good fortune for the people here to have a Doctor like you, so they do not depend any longer on their traditional healers.’ As the late Italian journalist Tiziano Terzani reports in one of his last books, Schweitzer did not like this remark, and replied, ‘What do you know about these healers?’ Cousins had to concede that he knew very little. Schweitzer continued: ‘Medicine men heal in the same way like we other physicians. The patient does not know it, but his real doctor is in himself. And we have success, when we give to this inner physician the opportunity to do his work.’”
via: Jack Fenner“Always the purpose of treatment is only to restore nature’s balance against disease. There is no recovery unless it comes from the force and fiber of one’s own tissues. The physician’s role is to be the cornerman—stitch up the lacerations, apply the soothing balm, encourage the use of the fighter’s specific abilities, say all the right things—to encourage the flagging strength of the real combatant, the pummeled body. As doctors, we do our best when we remove the obstacles to healing and encourage organs and cells to use their own nature-given power to overcome.”
Sherwin B. Nuland
more infosource: The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 278.
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category: body, disease, doctor, healing, health, medicine, nature, physician, recovery
medium: nonfiction
“Eating what stands on one leg [mushrooms and plant foods] is better than eating what stands on two legs [fowl], which is better than eating what stands on four legs [cows, pigs, and other mammals].”
Michael Pollan
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