Quotes & Sayings About Nurses
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Top Nurses Quotes

We are in the entertainment business and we all know if you are top of the tree you get the big money. Those of us who have been in it are the fortunate ones but we understand that we probably don't deserve it as much as the nurses or teachers. — Gary Lineker

Africa will get nowhere until we have mechanics ... Mechanics are the first stone in the building. Then there are other people on top. Doctors. Nurses. Teachers. But the whole thing is built on mechanics. That is why it is important to teach young people to be mechanics. — Alexander McCall Smith

America's doctors, nurses and medical researchers are the best in the world, but our health care system is broken. — Mike Ferguson

Nurses are natural kleptos. You don't want to be in a roon without enough supplies, so every time you walk past the med-cart you pocket another saline flush. By the end of the shift you can look like a chipmunk if you're not careful. Some days it's hard to remember that the gum at the end of the grocery aisle isn't there just for you. — Cassie Alexander

Life seems so vulgar, so easily content with the commonplace things of every day, and yet it always nurses and cherishes certain higher claims in secret, and looks about for the means of satisfying them. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. — C.S. Lewis

women were considered instinctual nurses in this generation - the field had received exciting publicity during the Spanish-American War when an Army Nursing Corps had served overseas in the Philippines. Clara Weeks-Shaw, the author of a popular textbook on nursing, promoted the field as "a new activity for women - congenial, honorable and remunerative and with permanent value to them in the common experience of domestic life."3 In readable language, Weeks-Shaw presented nursing as an artful balance between self-reliance and submission. Overall its practices were an extension of maternity, requiring the classic female behaviors of cheerfulness (to the patients) and obedience (to the doctors). "Never leave a doctor alone with a gynecology patient except at his request," went one injunction. — Jean H. Baker

The nurses in Willow Glen didn't try to prevent death. But they did try to guide you to die in the right way. Because if you died from something you weren't supposed to die from, families became suspicious. — Nathan Hill

Thou gavest; and to my nurses willingly to give me what Thou gavest them. For they, with a heaven-taught affection, willingly gave me what they abounded with from Thee. — Augustine Of Hippo

We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it. — Frances M. Beal

We had a teacher, named Mr. Brown, and he was writing something on the board once - he was writing something on the board, and he farted. And you would have thought kids had seen the face of God. Kids weren't even laughing; they were just sitting there screaming, just screaming. Kids had to get carted out; kids were screaming. Kids had to get carted out, and they were going to the nurses' office. Kids are crying in the hallway. 'Oh, this is our 9/11.' And it was. It was their 9/11 'cause they never thought anything like that could ever happen. — Donald Glover

no family can get on without women to help; that in every family, poor or rich, there are and must be nurses, either relations or hired. "No, — Anton Chekhov

One Chief Astronaut used to make a point of phoning the front desk at the clinic where applicants are sent for medical testing, to find out which ones treated the staff well - and which ones stood out in a bad way. The nurses and clinic staff have seen a whole lot of astronauts over the years, and they know what the wrong stuff looks like. A person with a superiority complex might unwittingly, right there in the waiting room, quash his or her chances of ever going to space. — Chris Hadfield

The people who are on the front lines every day in hospitals, nurses, the people who are running clinics, the people who are taking care of your children, those are the people who are the lovers of the world, are the good of the world. — Eve Ensler

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, male nurses ride the "glass escalator"; although they are in the minority, they receive higher wages and faster promotions than women in the same jobs. — Alexandra Robbins

I came out of the nine-hour surgery and I had tubes in every direction, and those nurses at the Mayo Clinic, I could cry for four days at the kindness of those nurses. The care, the detail of the care, the attention that just never wavered, never complained. The love. — Eve Ensler

If your child comes home with a stable staff of nurses that remains stable for years without interruption, you might be a family of unicorns — Charisse Montgomery

staff cutbacks that meant nurses were working their asses off to cover the basics and, as a result, were barely maintaining a white-knuckled grip on civility. Bottom line: she hated hospitals for the same reason everyone else did. If she was in a hospital, it meant one of two things. She'd been hurt. Or someone she loved had been hurt. — Jim Butcher

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family. — George Santayana

Nursing is great for so many reasons, but there is one reason that means more than any poll results, amount of money, or job security: Nurses make a difference. — Brittney Wilson

There's something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses or the truckers — Lindsey Graham

Once upon a time there lived a King and Queen whose children had all died, first one and then another, until at last only one little daughter remained, and the Queen was at her wits' end to know where to find a really good nurse who would take care of her, and bring her up. A herald was sent who blew a trumpet at every street corner, and commanded all the best nurses to appear before the Queen, that she might choose one for the little Princess. So on the appointed day the whole palace was crowded with nurses, who came from the four corners of the world to offer themselves, until the Queen declared that if she was ever to see the half of them, they must be brought out to her, one by one, as she sat in a shady wood near the palace. — Andrew Lang

TO ALL THE
ambulance drivers
firewatchers
air-raid wardens
nurses
canteen workers
airplane spotters
rescue workers
mathematicians
vicars
vergers
shopgirls
chorus girls
librarians
debutantes
spinsters
fishermen
retired sailors
servants
evacuees
Shakespearean actors
and mystery novelists
WHO WON THE WAR. — Connie Willis

Rotavirus does not cause all diarrhea, but it causes a lot of it. Instead of a single vaccine dose, however, harried nurses may have to give several, as diarrhoea makes it difficult for a child to retain anything. — Rose George

A hobby is an activity done at one's leisure - an occupation is done at another's. Since nurses are called upon at all times of the day, it is by nature an occupation, and a highly innapropriate one at that for two respectable girls — Kelly Zekas

Jerrykins, or Pickled Gherkins. Lord Peter was not one of those born uncles who delight old nurses by their — Dorothy L. Sayers

Studies have indicated there is a strong correlation between the shortages of nurses and morbidity and mortality rates in our hospitals. — Lois Capps

Nor had I any illusions about Algernon Charles Swinburne, who often used to stop my perambulator when he met it on Nurses' Walk, at the edge of Wimbledon Common, and pat me on the head and kiss me: he was an inveterate pram-stopper and patter and kisser. — Robert Graves

Go to any hospital, you'll find wards that are run by senior nurses with matrons. The point is do they have the power, do they have the responsibility inside the hospital? — Andrew Lansley

Chemotherapy can be a long, tough haul - for me, it went on for six months - and the best doctors and nurses become, if only for that period of time, as essential in your life as friends or spouses. — Julia Glass

It was backbreaking, round-the-clock work, and it made us realize how hard the nurses and aides and orderlies worked in their normal routines, but we managed to prevent skin breakdown or any other problems among the more than five hundred patients. Work — Oliver Sacks

On April 2, the nurses started my first round of five intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) infusions. The clear IV bags hung on a metal pole above my head, their liquid trickling down into my vein. Each of those ordinary-looking bags contained the healthy antibodies of over a thousand blood donors and cost upwards of $20,000 per infusion. One thousand tourniquets, one thousand nurses, one thousand veins, one thousand blood-sugar regulating cookies, all just to help one patient. — Susannah Cahalan

While large, impersonal orphanages provided children with minimal care and attention from an ever-changing series of nurses, children in loving foster families had available to them surrogate caregivers with whom they readily formed attachments. Children in foster care also demonstrated significantly less distress about the separation from their mothers, and they overcame their distress more readily when reunited with their own families. Therefore, it is not separation per se that is so devastating, but rather the extended stay in a strange, bleak or socially insensitive environment with little or no contact with the mother or other familiar figures. — Patricia K. Kerig

And no offense, but let's grow our own teachers, let's grow our own nurses - and so that we don't have to be scrounging around in our community clinics and other kinds of places - having to hire people from somewhere else. — Marion Barry

Men didn't like to empty bedpans, so we made women nurses. Then men didn't like to do the administrative stuff, so women were allowed to become secretaries. That's the way they entered the work force. Then we began to educate them because they had to be educated. But it wasn't until after World War II that most of the great universities of this country became coeducational. — John Shelby Spong

The doctors snap at the nurses, who snap at the patient care assistants, who snap at the cleaners, who snap at the patients who are too sick to respond. Those at the bottom of the heap have no choice but to be good. No one can doubt the virtue of the helpless. — Jinat Rehana Begum

When it comes to our public services, decentralisation means giving power back to those on the front line - our doctors, nurses, teachers and physiotherapists, and our locally elected officials. — Charles Kennedy

I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters - people who bust their tails every day. Not one of them - not one - stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. — Elizabeth Warren

The hospital will never be healthy for patients if it's not a healthy environment for nurses, where their voices are heard and where they can care for their patients and use the full extent of their knowledge, abilities, and skills. After all, hospitals today have become one big intensive care unit: all patients need intensive caring. — Tilda Shalof

Women in mystery fiction were largely confined to little old lady snoops - amateur sleuths - who are nurses, teachers, whatever. — Marcia Muller

One reason for the tremendous increase in health-care costs in the U.S. is managerial neglect of the "hotel services" by the people who dominate the hospital, such as doctors and nurses. — Peter Drucker

We know how to be doctors, nurses, lawyers. We know how to be tweeters. We know how to be everything. But how do you just be people? How do you be present with one another? How do you be honest with one another? How do you be compassionate towards one another, forgiving towards one another? We know what to do. We don't know what to be, how to be. — Iyanla Vanzant

I could stay here, I thought, make money at the track while she nurses me over the bad moments, rubs oils on my body, cooks for me, talks to me, goes to bed with me. — Charles Bukowski

Thus spake brave Horatius, the captain of the gate. To all men upon this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And what better way to die, than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of ones' fathers, and the temples of ones' G/Ds. For the tender mother, who dandled him to rest. And for the wife, who nurses his baby at her breast. And for the holy maidens, who feed the eternal flame. To save them from false sextus, that wrought the deed of shame. Lay down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may. I, with two more at either side, shall hold the foe in play. In Yon straight path a thousand may well be stop by three. Now who will stand on either hand and hold the bridge with me? — Thomas Babington Macaulay

A good culture in a hospital can absorb and manage a few bad nurses, but once the culture becomes bad in itself, bad nursing practice is much harder to hide. — Jo Brand

Do you visit all your patients?" I asked, peeking up at him.
He chuckled, and slid behind the nurses' station. He paused in the doorway of the stockroom, then turned. "Only the really special ones," he murmured, chocolate gaze sparkling as he winked and entered the supply room. — Shaye Evans

The billionaires pay an effective tax rate lower than nurses or truck drivers. That makes no sense at all. There has to be real tax reform, and the wealthiest and large corporations will pay. — Bernie Sanders

The partnership between nurses and families is based on mutual trust, and defining the boundaries and rules clearly will help everyone involved, especially your child. — Charisse Montgomery

I think what should be celebrated about our campaign is we have over 3 million people who have contributed to our campaign - teachers, firefighters, nurses, retirees. They're making up the backbone of this field organization in the country. — David Plouffe

There are no humans left. I should not be alone. I can't help but wonder that. There were so many of us living. But time started growing young four years ago. It isn't four years anymore. It's a number I wouldn't even be able to say. It feels like four years. It's trapped in my tender memory as four years. It's been an age. Multiple ages. It's been lifetimes; every single lifetime that used to exist. I remember my mother screaming. I recall the doctors naming me as nurses wiped away her blood and covered her face with white. The end of the play. It's been so long. Why am I alone? — F.K. Preston

Crying loudly is childish, in that it reflects a belief, on the cryer's part, that someone is around to hear the noise, and come a-running to make it all better. Crying in absolute silence, as Daniel does this morning, is the mark of the mature sufferer who no longer nurses, nor is nursed by, any such comfortable delusions. — Neal Stephenson

One of the things that's troubling is that people see Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, hey look, you know, we're having children. We're not married, but we are having these children and they're doing just fine. And I think it gives a distorted image that, yes, not everybody hires nannies and caretakers and nurses. — Anna Holmes

I learn so much that I previously did not know about the world of the immobile that it is hard to believe it all takes place over a few hours. At random: I learn about the casual indifference of the London cabbie to the wheelchair user and that the clearance on accessible entrances is measured in millimetres less than a knuckle. I learn how intractable it is to push a grown man around for hours and how spontaneity is the privilege of the able-bodied. In solid counterpart to all this grief, I learn about the lengths nurses are prepared to go to assist a purely recreational and ambitious project by one of their patients. — Marion Coutts

Perhaps the Queen's prayers, and those of Bernard, had been efficacious, or perhaps Louise had been more attentive in bed, for during 1145
the exact date is not recorded
she bore a daughter, who was named Marie in honour of the Virgin. If the infant was not the male heir to France so desired by the King
the Salic law forbade the succession of females to the throne
her arrival encouraged the royal parents to hope for a son in the future.
Relationships between aristocratic parents and children were rarely close. Queens and noblewomen did not nurse their own babies, but handed them over at birth into the care of wet nurses, leaving themselves free to become pregnant again. — Alison Weir

As people, we have forgotten to be people. We know how to be doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, we know what to do, we know what to buy, but how do I just sit with you in your pain? How do I sit with you in your vulnerability and not betray you, not abuse you? We do not know how to do that, even in our homes. — Iyanla Vanzant

I wonder what it would be like if we all became what we wanted to be when we grew up? I mean, imagine a world filled with nothing but firemen, cowboys, nurses and ballerinas. — Lily Tomlin

No one I met at this time
doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients
failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all. — George Orwell

The system is broken. The doctors and the nurses can't do everything. The patients need human attention; the patients themselves need to be addressed, rather than just their disease. — Colleen Saidman

I'd like Sloane to wear one of those sexy male nurses' uniforms, the white latex ones with the assless chaps. — Charlie Cochet

We can have the best health insurance options in the world, and people still won't get needed care if we don't increase our supply of primary care physicians and nurses. — Jeff Merkley

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers
or should I say, nurses?
will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us. — C.S. Lewis

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It's not an abstraction. I'm a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you're going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses. — Rand Paul

Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. And — Svetlana Alexievich

Nurses are an integral component of the health care system, and it is important that we recognize the over 2.7 million registered nurses for the significant work that they do. — Nathan Deal

(Florence) Nightingale's passion for statistics enabled her to persuade the government of the importance of a whole series of health reforms. for example, many people had argued that training nurses was a waste of time, because patients cared for by trained nurses actually had a higher mortality rate than those treated by untrained staff. Nightingale, however, pointed out that this was only because more serious cases were being sent to those wards with trained nurses. If the intention is to compare the results from two groups, then it is essential to assign patients randomly to the two groups. Sure enough, when Nightingale set up trials in which patients were randomly assigned to trained and untrained nurses, it became clear that the cohort of patients treated by trained nurses fared much better than their counterparts in wards with untrained nurses. — Simon Singh

He was raised by three nurses: freedom, solitude and Mademoiselle. Together, the three of them provided him with an education. From them, he learned everything he believed it was possible to learn. — Timothee De Fombelle

A Health Affairs study comparing patient-satisfaction scores with HCAHPS surveys of almost 100,000 nurses showed that a better nurse work environment was associated with higher scores on every patient-satisfaction survey question. — Alexandra Robbins

A modern hospital is like Grand Central Station - all noise and hubbub, and is filled with smoking physicians, nurses, orderlies, patients and visitors. Soft drinks are sold on each floor and everybody guzzles these popular poisons. The stench of chemicals offends the nose, while tranquillizers substitute for quietness. — Herbert M. Shelton

I'm an Air force Brat and I've lived all over the world and this country and there were people in my community who were gay - nurses, hairdressers, designers - people who just had a different way about themselves. — Pam Grier

His wet white face and miserable eyesBrought nurses to him more than groans and sighs:But hoarse and low and rapid rose and fellHis troubled voice: he did the business well.(First verse of Died of Wounds) — Siegfried Sassoon

When teachers try to teach, nurses try to nurse, small businesses try to serve their clients and the police try to arrest criminals, there is always a regulator or three breathing down their necks. Conservatives want to make people's lives easier. — John Redwood

Nurses on transplant wards often remarked that male transplant patients show renewed interest in sex. One reported that a patient asked her to wear something other than "that shapeless scrub" so he could see her breasts. A post-op who had been impotent for seven years before the operation was found holding his penis and demonstrating an erection. Another nurse spoke of a man who left the fly of his pajamas unfastened to show her his penis. Conclude Tabler and Frierson, "this irrational but common belief that the recipient will somehow develop characteristics of the donor is generally transitory but may alter sexual patterns.' Let us hope that the man with the chicken heart was blessed with a patient and open-minded spouse. — Mary Roach

In our short walks we passed the kitchen where food was prepared for the nurses and doctors. There we got glimpses of melons and grapes and all kinds of fruits, beautiful white bread and nice meats, and the hungry feeling would be increased tenfold. — Nellie Bly

For the last 3 years, we have celebrated National Nurses Week. Beginning on May 6, we will once again have the opportunity to truly commend the nursing community for their contributions to our national health delivery system. — Nathan Deal

She reminds herself that everyone has thoughts they wouldn't care to share with the world. Many people have quite perverse thoughts about doing things with animals or fruit, or being spanked by nurses. The difference, of course, is that their thoughts are securely locked away behind bland faces, whereas Sophie's are always in danger of being revealed to all in a sudden flood of colour. — Liane Moriarty

I think losing a loved one must be a little like losing a leg. First there is the shock, then the anesthetic, and the painkillers; the attention of doctors and nurses, flowers and cards and visits from friends. But sooner or later you have to learn to walk without it. — Ruth Graham

Our globe discovers its bidden virtues, not only in heroes and arch-angels, but in gossips and nurses. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hospital" turned out to represent a punctuated tedium, the recurrence of blood pressure and temperature checks, the placement and emptying of bedpans and painful switching of IV lines from the crook of one elbow to the other, and the switching of nurses as day and night were destroyed and replaced with tripartite shifts. — Jonathan Lethem

Nurses are there when the last breath is taken and nurses are there when the first breath is taken. Although it is more enjoyable to celebrate the birth, it is just as important to comfort in death. — Christine Bell

What's odd is that nobody in my family is an artist. My cousins are, like, secretaries at law firms or nurses or just more blue collar. And I was in a baseball team. I used to be, like, a really big tomboy. — Melonie Diaz

She had once told him that as soon as you placed your hands upon a stranger, they begin to talk. Everybody found it so, she said: hairdressers, nurses, nuns. It was dangerously easy to give in: human defences dissovled at another person's touch. — Charlotte Wood

Those who purify your water, inspect your meat, and test your kids' toys, as well as a huge number of nurses, teachers, and our soldiers, are public employees. The firefighters who don't hesitate to rush toward danger while you run away from it - they are all public employees. — Jennifer Granholm

But in residency, something else was gradually unfolding. In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it. Drowning, even in blood, one adapts, learns to float, to swim, even to enjoy life, bonding with the nurses, doctors, and others who are clinging to the same raft, caught in the same tide. My — Paul Kalanithi

At one time in my infancy I also knew no Latin, and yet by listening I learnt it with no fear or pain at all, from my nurses caressing me, from people laughing over jokes, and from those who played games and were enjoying them. I learnt Latin without the threat of punishment from anyone forcing me to learn it. My own heart constrained me to bring its concepts to birth, which I could not have done unless I had learnt some words, not from formal teaching but by listening to people talking; and they in turn were the audience for my thoughts. This experience sufficiently illuminates the truth that free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. — Augustine Of Hippo

It's just like nurses in a hospital tend to know more than the doctors most of the time; if you really want to get the answers to a question about court, you should spend more time buttering up the clerks than the judges. — Jodi Picoult

The expectation was I would get married and become a mother and settle down. We didn't have any role models. We saw teachers and doctors and nurses, but I'm not a teacher, and there was no possibility of being a doctor or a nurse. I had to work and find my own way. — Alexis Wright

Filming this drama made me realise how noble the nursing profession really is
from the selfless dedication to the care and love for patients. Let me take this opportunity to pay tribute to all the great nurses out there! — Rebecca Lim

When I first started out, I was trying to write stories about nurses and lawyers and a lot of people I didn't know anything about, and they just weren't working. — Donald Ray Pollock

Sure," I said. "But some people would ask, 'How can you expect others to replicate what you're doing here?' What would be your answer to that?" He turned back and, smiling sweetly, said, "Fuck you." Then, in a stentorian voice, he corrected himself: "No. I would say, 'The objective is to inculcate in the doctors and nurses the spirit to dedicate themselves to the patients, and especially to having an outcome-oriented view of TB.' " He was grinning, his face alight. He looked very young just then. "In other words, 'Fuck you. — Tracy Kidder

The servants were evil," he said, recalling the tale the way the whiskey priest they sent to Creedmoor told it, sitting with Mr. Persichetti at the nurses' station late into the night, those watery blue eyes forever bloodshot and sleepless. "They told the crazy chieftain that he should marry his beautiful daughter instead. Which he tried to do." ("If you get my meaning," the priest had said.) "But Dymphna ran off to Belgium." He saw her grimace and purse her lips, her face seemed to swell with color. "Her crazy father followed her," he said, tightening his own grip on her hand. "I guess he cut off her head. — Alice McDermott

The idea of the camp was to use it as a staging area for soldiers on their way to liberate France. It was much better than putting them in Boston in case the Germans attacked. Allied soldiers from several countries left from Camp Myles Standish to go to England and then on to France. They would only stay for a week or two. One group would go out, and another group would come in. At that camp we were doing everything, all the maintenance. There was a small hospital with nurses and doctors, and we were busy. I worked in the PX. We sold coca-cola, and Narragansett beer was delivered once a month. Cigarettes were five dollars a carton. There was plenty of food. We were glad when they gave us American uniforms; that meant we were something. We had work, and we were doing something good. When Italy got out of the war, and we signed to cooperate, that felt pretty good. — Deborah L. Halliday

How's his appendix?"
"Like crap. They almost didn't catch it in time, and he's still doing the ass-plant in a hospital bed, being
doted on by an army of hot nurses. Makes me sick."
"Maybeyou should rupture something."
"Any more of these stories out of you and I just might. — Marjorie M. Liu

Great physicians and nurses, skilled, caring and unparalleled in their training, intervened in my life and probably saved it. I was lucky but other Americans are not. It is time to speak again and stand again for the ideal that in the richest nation ever on this planet, it is wrong for 41 million Americans, most of them in working families, to worry at night and wake up in the morning without the basic protection of health insurance. — John F. Kerry

Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted teacake, and the nurses will say "Poor Mrs. Frazer, that's the end," and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It's not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady. — Fay Weldon

She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had attended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone - to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny. — Margaret Atwood

You're right. Many nurses nowadays don't like doing the things that nurses used to have to do. Changing sheets and collecting bedpans - that sort of thing. Nursing has moved on, Bertie.'
Bertie was puzzled. 'But if they don't do that,' he said, 'then who does? Do people have to tuck themselves into bed when they're in hospital?'
Irene was amused by this and raised her eyes again. 'Dear Bertie, no, not at all. They have other people now to do that sort of thing. There are other wome ... people who do that.' 'So they aren't nurses, Mummy?' asked Bertie. Irene waved a hand vaguely. 'No. They call them care assistants, or something like that. It's very important work.' 'So what do the nurses do then, Mummy? If they have somebody else to take the bedpans to the patients, what's left for the nurses to do? Do they do the things that doctors do? Can nurses take your tonsils out?' 'I think they'd like to,' said Irene. — Alexander McCall Smith