Christopher Hitchens Quotes

It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad 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.

Probably the toughest time in my life was - was standing there with Ann as we hugged each other and the diagnosis came. And I was afraid it was Lou Gehrig's disease. As we came into the doctor's office, the brochures on his table there were Lou Gehrig's, ALS, and multiple sclerosis.

I would urge the government to allocate more funds toward fighting cancer. My own situation, it made me think. It made me think about the potential of dying. I wouldn't say I was scared. I'm more scared of how it will happen than of it happening. I'm not scared that I'm going to die. I think of how I'm going to die ... I don't want to linger. That scares me a little. The idea of lingering.

A lot of money is spent trying to keep people alive who don't necessarily want to be alive.

Instead of joyfully looking forward to my birth, my mother began systematically preparing for her own death. She was fatalistic.

Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long.

I did not fully understand the dread term 'terminal illness' until I saw Heathrow for myself.

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

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.

My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him.

The minute someone tells you you have cancer, it's kind of like you die. You really do die. It's like you get that you're mortal.

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

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

I accept the dying process. I would just like to be as healthy as I possibly can at each step and phase along the way.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

A terminal diagnosis can really mess with your head. Honestly, it makes you want to run away to the moon. Many ALS patients want to fade away quietly. This was not for me.

I think some people do want to die, and they will get a disease. There are people who know their lives are so troubled, and their bodies are getting them out of here.

'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.

I probably am a dead man already.

It is the duty of the doctor to prolong life. It is not his duty to prolong dying.

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

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.