Ann Hood Quotes

My dad was diagnosed with cancer, so we ended up burying him a year to the day that he was diagnosed.

Anna Deavere Smith's new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that 'Let Me Down Easy' is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying.

Death is a fact of life, no matter where you live. Taking care of the dying is a necessity everywhere. Those are not conditions exclusive to small towns.

This has been harder for my friends. I know I'm going to die.

For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.

You can't tell a 6-year-old your sister is going to die.

My mother died of metastatic colorectal cancer shortly before three P.M. on Christmas Day of 2008. I don't know the exact time of her death, because none of us thought to look at a clock for a while after she stopped breathing.

I was labeled 'P-E-A,' which is patient expired on arrival. I guess that's the politically correct way of saying you didn't make it.

I didn't know it, but my father had a brain tumour. Everything happened very fast. Within a year, he was gone. Because I was so young, I didn't completely understand the concept of death.

I don't want to die in pain or in an undignified way, I don't want any of the people I love to die in, die painfully. But I'm aware of the fact that they may die before I do and I have to part with them and take the loss. The hardest thing of love is to let go. But I think I can get let go of almost anybody.

I know what it's like to see one's mother go through the agony of death and be unable to help; there is no consolation. We all have to bear such heavy burdens, for they are unalterably linked to life.

I’m always feeling death, and that is a part of life. When you know a lot of people, you will always experience death.

Death, whether it regards ourselves or others, appears less terrible in war than at home. The cries of women and children, friends in anguish, a dark room, dim tapers, priests and physicians, are what affect us the most on the death-bed. Behold us already more than half dead and buried.

Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody elses.

Death is too much to ask of the living.

We'll bury our mothers and fathers - shuttling our children off for sleepovers, jumping on red-eyes, telling eachother stories that hurt to hear, about gasping, agonal breaths, hospice nurses, scars and bruises and scabs, and how skin papers shortly after a person passes. We will nod in agreement that it is as much an honor to witness a person leave this world as it is to watch a person come into it.

Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

I have to tell you it was the first time even after all these years of expecting my own death that i truly knew what it meant to die because with you gone there was nothing left for me to live for.

When along the pavement, Palpitating flames of life, People flicker around me, I forget my bereavement, The gap in the great constellation, The place where a star used to be

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.

Each departed friend is a magnet that attracts us to the next world.

There is no flock, however watched and tended, but one dead lamb is there! There is no fireside howsoe'er defended, but has one vacant chair.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

I've not really had a bad Christmas. Apart from serious things, like when my father died. He rather spoiled the party and I've never forgiven him for falling off the twig on Christmas Day.