Quotations (11)

Being Mortal

Medicine and What Matters in the End
1 to 11 of 11 items
We've created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets — and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan.
Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.
5 Key Questions at the end of Life: 1. What is your understanding of your current health or condition? 2. What are your fears or worries? 3. What are your goals and priorities? 4. Are there any tradeoffs you are willing to make? 5. What…
When I was a child, the lessons my father taught me had been about perseverance: never to accept limitations that stood in my way. As an adult watching him in his final years, I also saw how to come to terms with limits that couldn't…
In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments -- which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and…
...Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength. pg 232
The choices don't stop, however. Life is choices, and they are relentless. No sooner have you made one choice than another is upon you. pg 215
Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room. That's why elderly people like my grandfather are so…
People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come--and escape a warehoused oblivion…
Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to the world after we die.If self interest were the primary source of meaning in life, then it wouldn't matter to people if an hour after their death everyone they know were to be…
We want autonomy for ourselves and safety for those we love. pg 106