Nick Nolte Quotes

Hospice is such a tremendous thing. Patients seem to reach an inner peace.

Hospice has brought such a light in my life. It is something I will be involved with until I need hospice myself.

Unless they've had some experience with it, the hospice is still a mystery to most people. Because hospice deals with death, people tend not to talk about it.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

The prime goal is to alleviate suffering, and not to prolong life. And if your treatment does not alleviate suffering, but only prolongs life, that treatment should be stopped.

Hospice means end-of-life care. The admission ticket is a diagnosis from a doctor that you have six months or less to live.

We could keep his body going, but it was trying its hardest to die.

Bodily discomfort and emotional fear and attachment make the dying uncomfortable and fearful. So, to help those dying people, I think modern medical science has a lot of facilities to reduce pain, or perhaps not to reduce pain, but not to experience pain.

The definition of what it means to be dying has changed radically. We are able to extend people's lives considerably, including sometimes, good days.

Many, if not most, Americans can imagine a fate worse than death, and it is a seemingly interminable process of dying. For them, it is frightening that politicians can find ways to interject themselves into this sad process.

In the last stages of a final illness, we need only the absence of pain and the presence of family.

A long disease seems to be a halting place between life and death, that death itself may be a comfort to those who die and to those who are left behind.

When I came to this country in 1958, to be a dying patient in a medical hospital was a nightmare. You were put in the last room, furthest away from the nurses' station. You were full of pain, but they wouldn't give you morphine. Nobody told you that you were full of cancer and that it was understandable that you had pain and needed medication.

I'm great at a deathbed. I've never given tranquillisers or psychiatric medicine. I've given love and fun and creativity and passion and hope, and these things ease suffering.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

Americans of all ages deserve quality end-of-life medical care.

I don't want a few extra weeks of life at enormous cost, for example, when it comes to the end.

Having been an oncologist and having cared for scores, if not hundreds, of dying patients, when you don't have a treatment that can shrink the tumor and the patient will die, it's a very difficult conversation. It's emotionally draining.

I believe we should support people to live, and I am therefore in favour of good quality palliative care.

The end of life is likely to be an important focus for innovation. Most people die in hospitals, tied up with tubes and with their bodies pumped full of drugs. Yet most would rather die at home and with more control over the timing and manner of their death.

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

Life is an incurable condition: the only known treatment is to try to keep the patient comfortable.

Whereas a prolonged life is not necessarily better, a prolonged death is necessarily worse.