Terminally Quotes & Sayings

On the flight over to Chicago, I thought of a story Mom had once told me from her days as a pediatric nurse.
"There was this little boy I was taking care of," she said "and he was terminally ill,and we all knew it,but he kept hanging on and hanging on. He wouldn't die, it was so sad.
And his parents were always there with him,giving him so much love and support,but he was in so much pain,and it really was,time for him to go.
So finally some of us nurses took his father aside and we told him, 'You have to tell your son it's okay for him to go. You have to give him permission.' And so the father took his son in his arms and he sat with him in a chair and held on to him and told him over and over, that it was okay for him to go,and,well,after a few moments,his son died. — Anthony Rapp

Possessions, for the terminally frightened, bring peace of mind. — Cynthia Heimel

But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You're not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You're here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill - and we're all terminally ill on this bus - what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them. — Anne Lamott

The marquis breathed heavily on his fingernails and polished them on the lapel of his coat. "I have always felt," he said, "that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the final sanctuary of the terminally inept. — Neil Gaiman

We are all terminally mortal, but looking after each other will help us to become part of the immortal divine. — John Kramer

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington. — Matt Taibbi

It was a stamp. It was a yellowy-green color. It showed - Moist peered - a field of cabbages, with some buildings on the horizon. He sniffed. It smelled of cabbages. Oh, yes. "Printed with cabbage ink and using gum made from broccoli, sir," said Stanley, full of pride. "'A Salute to the Cabbage Industry of the Sto Plains,' sir. I think it might do very well. Cabbages are so popular, sir. You can make so many things out of them!" "Well, I can see that - " "There's cabbage soup, cabbage beer, cabbage fudge, cabbage cake, cream of cabbage - " "Yes, Stanley, I think you - " " - pickled cabbage, cabbage jelly, cabbage salad, boiled cabbage, deep-fried cabbage - " "Yes, but now can - " " - fricassee of cabbage, cabbage chutney, cabbage Surprise, sausages - " "Sausages?" "Filled with cabbage, sir. You can make practically anything with cabbage, sir. Then there's - " "Cabbage stamps," said Moist terminally. — Terry Pratchett

Maybe there were times when suicide made sense. When the immoral choice is moral. Emerson could believe that. But his father was no Walter White. He hadn't been terminally ill or struggling with addiction or living a dual life where he'd accrued huge gambling debts that he couldn't pay off. There'd been no sacrifice in his actions. Only weakness. And his pain, however deep it had been, hadn't disappeared with his death. He'd simply passed it on to those who'd loved him. That's what really got to Emerson. The selfishness of it all. — Stephanie Kuehn

Reticulocytes are terminally differentiating red blood cells that do not contain lysosome. Therefore, it was postulated that the degradation of hemoglobin in these cells is mediated by a non-lysosomal machinery. — Aaron Ciechanover

My mom was a saint. She taught me to be terminally nice. — Iggy Pop

I have always felt that violence was the last refuge of the incompetent, and empty threats the last sanctuary of the terminally inept. — Neil Gaiman

In this neighbourhood people don't venture out after dark. It's not safe for them. Only the terminally stupid and the criminally motivated come out at this hour. — J.J. Bonds

I can't stand terminally stupid people. — Larry Moniz

None of us really either know the circumstances of our death or are likely to exert as much control over it as we would like to, but we can certainly have a little more say in it if we are terminally ill than we have at the moment. That's the element of dignity, but sure, life is very hard to organise even when you are fit and healthy. — Ian McEwan

A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err. — Atul Gawande

When you spend as much time as I do with wounded warriors and their families, and terminally ill kids and their families, you are humbled and powerfully inspired by their courage and positive energy to live your life to the absolute best you can everyday. It will wake you up really fast to never stop believing. — Ted Nugent

Parents, do your daughters come home smelling like an orchard? Is their giggle quotient higher than usual? They may be in thrall to the dangerous wine cooler. Gateway drug of the terminally insecure, its usage results in excessive clumsiness and the condition 'trophy wife-itis.' The lethalness of which only manifests after age thirty-five and ends in gutter living and suicide. — Tellulah Darling

Helping the terminally ill to consciously end their lives is a crime, while denying health care to the living is seen as sound fiscal practice. — Starhawk

Even while terminally ill, Paul was fully alive; despite physical collapse, he remained vigorous, open, full of hope not for an unlikely cure but for days that were full of purpose and meaning. — Paul Kalanithi

But since death is inevitable we don't have to deal with it (it'll deal with us when it decides to). What we do have to deal with is the psychic, physical, and fusion diseases wrought during our so-called lives as byproducts of the elemental clash. In other words we're all terminally psychotic and no doctor, hospital, pill, needle, book or guru holds the cure. Because the disease is called life and there is no cure for that but death and death's just part of the set-up designed to keep you terrified and thus in bondage from the cradle to the crypt so ha ha the joke's on you except there's no punchline and the comedian forgot you ever existed as even a comma. — Lester Bangs

A pillar of strength, Daffy had once remarked, was a nice way of saying someone was terminally bossy, — Alan Bradley

We're all misfits here," he says, almost proudly. "That's why I started this squat, after all. For people like us, who don't fit in anywhere else. Halfies and homos and hopeless romantics, the outcast and outrageous and terminally weird. That's where art comes from, Jimmy, my friend. From our weirdnesses and our differences, from our manic fixations, our obsessions, our passions. From all those wild and wacky things that make each of us unique. — Terri Windling

One day the ordinariness will be terminally punctuated by the extraordinary full stop of death. — Glen Duncan

The day he learned that he was terminally ill was the day he lost interest in his purchasing power. — Mitch Albom

Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life. — Sarah Perry

A woman (Terri Schiavo) was healthy. There was brain damage, there was no question. But from a health point of view, she was not terminally ill. — Michele Bachmann

They called it "lovesickness," and I had to laugh. I was sick, and they were sick, and everyone who ever touched love was most certainly terminally ill. We all died from this disease of love. — C.D. Reiss

When did my house turn into a hangout for every grossly overpaid, terminally pampered professional football player in northern Illinois?"
"We like it here," Jason said. "It reminds us of home."
"Plus, no women around." Leandro Collins, the Bears' first-string tight end emerged from the office munching on a bag of chips. "There's times when you need a rest from the ladies."
Annabelle shot out her arm and smacked him in the side of the head. "Don't forget who you're talking to."
Leandro had a short fuse, and he'd been known to take out a ref here and there when he didn't like a call, but the tight end merely rubbed the side of his head and grimaced. "Just like my mama."
"Mine, too," Tremaine said with happy nod.
Annabelle spun on Heath. "Their mother! I'm thirty-one years old, and I remind them of their mothers."
"You act like my mother," Sean pointed out, unwisely as it transpired, because he got a swat in the head next. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

From: Beth Fremont
To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder
Sent: Thurs, 09/30/1999 3:42 PM
Subject: If you were Superman ...
... and you could choose any alter ego you wanted, why the hell would you choose to spend your Clark Kent hours - which already suck because you have to wear glasses and you can't fly - at a newspaper? Why not pose as a wealthy playboy like Batman? Or the leader of a small but important nation like Black Panther? Why would you choose to spend your days on deadline, making crap money, dealing with terminally crabby editors? — Rainbow Rowell

It is the last place heading south before the landscape gets terminally dusty, glum and thinly settled, so it has an oasis or frontier atmosphere and a sense that the cappuccinos are a bit hard-won. — Simon Winder

We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill. Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love - to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful. — Paul Kalanithi

The families who chose me to take their terminally ill kids on their last hunts in life many times over the years know and love the real Ted Nugent. That they decide I'm good enough to take part in such a spiritual and emotional moment in their lives proves that I am good enough. — Ted Nugent

By more than two to one Americans do not consider what Kevorkian did, injecting a terminally ill patient with legal drugs at the patient's request, to be the same as murder. You may want to note that laws are not supposed to be enforced on the basis of public opinion polls. — Dan Rather

A great deal of stupidity has chipped away at the massive advantages of Western civilization, which could terminally decline if it remains on the current path. But these problems can be solved - and swiftly - if the right leaders emerge. — Paul Singer

We all just realized that I am terminally ill and I'm dying and I would just prefer to die with less pain and less suffering. — Brittany Maynard

You told me there wouldn't be any Rod Serling voice-overs, yet here I am in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode. Oh, and let me guess the title of it, Night of the Terminally Stupid! (Channon) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Time is always relative.... For the terminally ill, six months are a lifetime, and not a very long one. To a three-year-old waiting for Christmas, it's an eternity so distant it's not even worth thinking about. — John Saul

Sweetheart," Sean said, "you are the farthest thing from terminally unfuckable I can possibly imagine. — Ruthie Knox

He tried to remember her ever being this way before. In her voice
almost overexuberant
was not simply holiday cheer but joyous relief, like some terminally ill patient who's just been told she's not sick anymore. — Andre Dubus III

I feel like it's a good time to be a writer. I'm terminally optimistic. It seems like the publishing industry is in the middle of a big transition, and that the rules of the game are still sorting themselves out. — Brad Listi

What point is there in dying in a ward, listening to the moans and rasps of the terminally ill? Wouldn't it be better to spend the twenty-seven thousand on a banquet, then, after taking poison, depart for the other world to the sound of violins, surrounded by intoxicated beautiful women and dashing friends? — Mikhail Bulgakov

I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation. — Gloria Steinem

Today's science should also relieve us of the fear that our children are at great risk to be recruited into homosexuality. I believe that if the gay community sent missionaries door to door like we Mormons do, spreading the good news of homosexuality, they would get pitifully few converts, probably only a small sliver of the terminally confused. "Join us and very possibly break your parents' hearts, throw the family into chaos, run the risk of intense self-loathing, especially if you are religious, invite the disgust of much of society, give up the warmth and benefits of marriage and probably of parenthood." (16) — Carol Lynn Pearson

I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a houseful of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but not it's a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of tribal masks and rain sticks. But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women's progress as a gender. I'm damn proud of us. Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip. — Kristin Newman

I remember the period in the 1980s where the Beatles were terminally uncool, and it seemed to me then like they were just my little secret, and the rest of the world didn't know anything about them. — Alasdair MacLean

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man's-land. — P.D. James

Suppose there were groups of secularists at hospitals who went round the terminally ill and urged them to adopt atheism: 'Don't be a mug all your life. Make your last days the best ones. People might suppose this was in poor taste. — Christopher Hitchens

By what logical principle should the relief of death be granted only the terminally ill? Such a restriction is itself perverse. After all, the terminally ill face only a brief period of suffering. The chronically ill, or the healthy but bereft - they face a lifetime of agony. Why deny them the relief of a humane exit? — Charles Krauthammer

Something had been taken away from him in the war, against his will, and he would never be the same. Years in labour camps, in mountains, in salt mines: only solitude was natural to him now. Some part of him was terminally tired. He was beyond intimacy. The pretence at normality, the weight of the past, the unreality of the days here had exhausted him. — Joan London

Over a third of the Newenhan population was under eighteen,which didn't make his job any easier, the hormonally challenged being terminally and all too often fatally prone to acts of stupidity. — Dana Stabenow

We must heal this terminally ill world with love. — Sunday Adelaja

Granuaile looked terminally depressed when she emerged from the bathroom with raven hair and, as a result rather Goth by accident. She didn't want to get her picture taken.
"Aughh!" she said miserably, looking in the vanity mirror in the truck of the cab and fingering a wavy curl near her temple. "This sucks more than anything has ever sucked before. You know what we look like? A couple of emo douche bags."
"Well, look at the bright side, Granuaile. Emo Douche Bags would be a great band name."
[That's brilliant! It's already the unofficial name of more bands than I can count.] — Kevin Hearne

Circulating through the children's ward and seeing terminally ill kids, heads shaved, smiling and having a ball despite the tubes and needles sticking into them, I thought: What do I have to worry about? If God takes me, at least I've lived for 35 years. — Eric Davis

I'm terminally dissatisfied. That's probably part of being an artist. — Jared Leto

talk therapy for the terminally introverted. — Susan Sey

I had worked and waited for this day. In solving this mystery I had also proved something, at least to myself, and I finally knew what real research would feel like. But as satisfying as it was, it still stands out as one of the loneliest moments of my life. On some deep level, the realization that I could do good science was accompanied by the knowledge that I had formally and terminally missed my chance to become like any of the women that I had ever known. In — Hope Jahren

Terminally ill cancer patients who were put on a mechanical ventilator, given electrical defibrillation or chest compressions, or admitted, near death, to intensive care had a substantially worse quality of life in their last week than those who received no such interventions. And, six months after their death, their caregivers were three times as likely to suffer major depression. — Atul Gawande

There's very few things that tear me up and get me, but kids, especially terminally ill kids or kids with diseases ... gets me every time. — Tyler Farr

We evolved haphazardly within a random universe; no purpose underpins us, no God watches over us, and no assured glorious future awaits us. We are saddled with a dualistic consciousness that weighs us down and plays tricks on us. We have built and seem unable to dismantle a dehumanizing and destructive civilization and mindset that perpetuates deceit and greed. We can make ourselves as comfortable as possible, as doctors tell their terminally ill patients, but we are sadly incurable. — Colin Feltham

But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution - don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifice, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life. — David Sheff

It may be hard to hear, but victim thinking is actually self-centered. If you're stuck in a victim mindset, you feel one down, helpless, and at the mercy of others. From this place you perceive yourself as the target of unfortunate events and other people. You may interpret random events as being about your exceptionally bad luck or as a sign that other people are out to get you. You become "terminally unique" in your outlook and you may even become paranoid. When you take on the role of victim as an identity or a badge of honor, you are actively participating in your victimization and disowning your authentic personal power. "You are only a victim for a nanosecond." - Pia Mellody — Vicki Tidwell Palmer

My joy need not be destroyed by a self-absorbed colonel, a terminally ignorant administrator, the incessant cell phone chatter of a self-important suit on the airplane, or losing sight in one eye. My joy is destroyed by believing that they can affect my joy, thereby making it so. — Natalie Sudman

Decisions to cut aid for the terminally ill, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. — Audre Lorde

I'm not devastated over a baseball game. If somebody came to me and said, 'Your wife is terminally ill.' Or, if my kids and wife get on a plane and I got a call that said, 'Something happened with the plane,' that's devastating. — Tom Glavine

Our popular economics writers, however, are not in the business of giving their readers a ringside seat on the research action; with no exception I can think of, they use their books to do an end run around the normal structure of scholarship, to preach ideas that few serious economists share. Often, these ideas are not just at odds with the professional consensus; they are demonstrably wrong, and sometimes terminally silly. But they sound good to the unwary reader. — Paul Krugman

She sighed. Loudly. "Physical appearance is not what is important."
Yeah right. Tell that to any girl who hasn't bothered to put on a presentable shirt or fix her hair because she's only running into the grocery store to get a quart of milk for her grandmother, and who does she see tending the 7-ITEMS-OR-LESS cash register but the guy of her dreams, except she can't even say hi - much less try to develop a meaningful relationship - since she looks like the poster child for the terminally geeky. — Vivian Vande Velde

It's just like a big chunk of me has been ripped out and I'm not quite whole. I don't think I'm over dramatizing it, and I'm certainly deserving of it, but the way I feel now, it's just like you're talking to someone who is terminally ill and facing death. Death would be preferable to what I am facing. I just feel like imploding upon myself, you know? I just want to go somewhere and disappear. — Jeffrey Dahmer

Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing - and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life. — Jacob M. Appel

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there's a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they're not the same, ever again. — Alice Walker

My Zombie apocalypse plan is simple but effective; I fully intend to die in the very first wave.
Seems more logical than undergoing all kinds of hardships only to die eventually anyway (through bites/malnutrition/or terminally chapped lips) — Graham Parke

addition to the major types of cell that result from differentiation, similar processes can also alter the phenotype of terminally differentiated cells to subtly alter their functions. These different programmes of gene expression are often referred to as altered states of activation, or polarisation. — Clett Erridge

God's fundamental goal for believers is not to protect us from harm or suffering, to make us comfortable, or to benefit from our service. You can biblically sum up God's primary aim for your whole life in one uncomfortable word: change. Ironic as it may sound, change is the one constant that God purposes for every believer, regardless of circumstances - whether you are in ministry or in a secular job, married or single, healthy or handicapped, chronically ill or terminally diseased. God's immediate and ongoing purpose for every Christian in time and on earth is to change us, to make us like Himself, to conform us to the image of His Son. — Layton Talbert

I want people to understand, that you are responsible for your life. Weather you are transexual, weather you are a divorcee, weather you are terminally ill, weather you are posessed by the devil or trying to get the devil out of you. You have control over your life, and it is only when you recognize that, and is willing to be responsible for your life that you can truely soar, and I believe that it's possible in our lifetime to fly if you want to. — Oprah Winfrey

You are terminally arrogant, — Jeaniene Frost

Not that he was a fool. No, the book was full of insight. Disturbing insight. The Lord Mistborn advocated gathering the Metalborn who were elderly or terminally ill, then asking them to sacrifice themselves to make these ... spikes, which could in turn be used to create individuals of great power. — Brandon Sanderson

Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. — Lester Bangs

Also problematic is the Christian Right's blocking of legislation that would otherwise give people options to reduce or end their pain and suffering. It opposes medicinal marijuana for the terminally ill and calls for prosecuting doctors who euthanize terminally ill patients at the patients' requests. — Kimberly Blaker

And then everything was in the hands of gravity, which has never had much love for the terminally stupid. — Mira Grant