Terry Pratchett Quotes

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

Health care has not so much slowed the ageing process as much as it has slowed the dying process.

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.

You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.

In Khmer we have a saying that when one is both quite sick and old there remains only one thing, that you die.

'Aging' has been bad ever since we figured out it led to dying.

We don’t have a right to die; we have a duty to die.

Wait for them to die

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

"I'm going over the valley." (Dying from throat cancer, his doctor found him wandering around his room, asked him where was he going?)

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

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.

Often it is fatal to live too long.

The young may die, but the old must!

Old age is not as honorable as death, but most people seek it.

All diseases run into one, old age.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

Most people understand life expectancy has changed since Social Security started in 1937 when folks lived to be 59 years old. Today, they live to be 77 years old.

I work with a group called Compassion & Choices in California. It's attempting to get death with dignity legalised in California, the idea being that so goes California, so goes the rest of the U.S., at least.

People use so much more health care when they live longer.

When people are dying, bureaucracy should be thrown out of the water.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

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.

My father's death from prostate cancer in 1993 was tragic. He never complained about pain. He was a fighter. By the time he was ready to die he wasn't able to die in the way that he wanted to, which seemed an outrage to me.