Dying Well By Ira Byock Quotes & Sayings

Individual liberty, the basic underpinning of American society, requires constant defense against the encroachment of the state. — Paul Singer

For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money. — George Orwell

Depression is always in the details. — Julia Alvarez

Magic is crazy. He is that crazy wild guy on the basketball court that is very intense and very serious. He is the guy who lives and eats and breathes basketball. Magic is a guy who would stand for nothing but winning and really prepared himself as well as he prepared his team. Earvin is the complete opposite. — Magic Johnson

For among writers there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good. — Virginia Woolf

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china. — Rebecca West

The brutal, soul-shaking truth is that we are so earthly minded we are of no heavenly use. — Leonard Ravenhill

Cheerless poverty has no harder trial than this, that it makes men the subject of ridicule.
[Lat., Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se
Quam quod ridiculos homines facit.] — Juvenal

But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

Those who improve with age embrace the power of personal growth and personal achievement and begin to replace youth with wisdom, innocence with understanding, and lack of purpose with self-actualization. — Bo Bennett

Nearly everyone who is asked where they want to spend their final days says at home, surrounded by people they love and who love them. That's the consistent finding of surveys and, in my experience as a doctor, remains true when people become patients. Unfortunately, it's not the way things turn out. At present, just over one-fifth of Americans are at home when they die. Over 30 percent die in nursing homes, where, according to polls, virtually no one says they want to be. Hospitals remain the site of over 50 percent of deaths in most parts of the country, and nearly 40 percent of people who die in a hospital spend their last days in ICU, where they will likely be sedated or have their arms tied down so they will not pull out breathing tubes, intravenous lines, or catheters. Dying is hard, but it doesn't have to be this hard. — Ira Byock