Jane Smiley Quotes

When they told me I had cancer, I thought I was going to die.

My job as a physician is to make sure I have provided my patients with the best options to make the decisions that affect their lives.

Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.

People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life.

I love the opportunity to help my patients, to work with them to find the best course of action to get them healthy and to give them the information they need to stay healthy.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of languor and suffering an image of death.

Death is always less painful and easier than life! You speak true. And yet we do not, day to day, choose death. Because ultimately, death is not the opposite of life, but the opposite of choice. Death is what you get when there are no choices left to make.

nobody ever dies of an indignity.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

Both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do.

Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.

You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.

If I got hit by a truck, I would want to go to hospital, but if something is bothering me I will see my naturopath.

Cancer is the great equalizer. Everyone is affected by it either themselves or through loved ones.

I was able to get operated on four days after I was diagnosed. It was just a matter of getting this baseball-sized tumor out of me. I reflect now on how lucky I was to be in the situation where I could get the best possible help and treatment.

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

The word 'cancer' carries with it enormous fear, fear for the future, fear for family.

Medicine is the means by which we poor feeble creatures try to keep from dying or aching.

There's never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.

The physician's highest calling, his only calling, is to make sick people healthy - to heal, as it is termed.

You hear the word 'cancer,' it scares you. You think of death.

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.

I think everybody has their pain. For me, the time that I really had to grow up was when I was 15 and I had my best friend die of leukemia. Watching somebody so strong go through that is definitely something that will give you a little bit of depth. There have been a lot of things that have happened in my life that has forced me to grow up.