Hospital Quotes

There were usually not nearly as many sick people inside the hospital as Yossarian saw outside the hospital, and there were generally fewer people inside the hospital who were seriously sick. There was a much lower death rate inside the hospital than outside the hospital, and a much healthier death rate. Few people died unnecessarily. People knew a lot more about dying inside the hospital and made a much neater job of it. They couldn’t dominate Death inside the hospital, but they certainly made her behave. They had taught her manners. They couldn’t keep Death out, but while she was there she had to act like a lady. People gave up the ghost with delicacy and taste inside the hospital. There was none of that crude, ugly ostentation about dying that was so common outside of the hospital. They did not blow-up in mid-air like Kraft or the dead man in Yossarian’s tent, or freeze to death in the blazing summertime the way Snowden had frozen to death after spilling his secret to Yossarian in the back of the plane.“I’m cold,” Snowden had whimpered. “I’m cold.”“There, there,” Yossarian had tried to comfort him. “There, there.”They didn’t take it on the lam weirdly inside a cloud the way Clevinger had done. They didn’t explode into blood and clotted matter. They didn’t drown or get struck by lightning, mangled by machinery or crushed in landslides. They didn’t get shot to death in hold-ups, strangled to death in rapes, stabbed to death in saloons, blugeoned to death with axes by parents or children, or die summarily by some other act of God. Nobody choked to death. People bled to death like gentlemen in an operating room or expired without comment in an oxygen tent. There was none of that tricky now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t business so much in vogue outside the hospital, none of that now-I-am-and-now-I-ain’t. There were no famines or floods. Children didn’t suffocate in cradles or iceboxes or fall under trucks. No one was beaten to death. People didn’t stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of thirty-two feet per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.

~ Joseph Heller

I didn't know what kind of creature I was supposed to be until I woke on a hospital cot and was informed I had died. Nobody ever told me what I was. I figured I was broken. But it turns out that my scars were divine signs that I was granted a chance to begin again.

~ Hannah Ashworth

He was a loving father, but he did his loving in private. Quietly, he would tell his daughter to drive safely. On her wedding day, when he walked her down the aisle, he'd whisper the words to her. But today, above the noise, he would have to shout it.

~ Debra Anastasia

Sam Temple was taken by helicopter to a hospital in Los Angeles, where there were specialists there in burn injuries. He wasn’t consulted: he was found on his knees, obviously in shock, extensively burned. EMTs took over.Astrid Ellison was taken to a hospital in Santa Barbara, as was Diana Ladris.Other kids were shared out among half a dozen hospitals. Some specialized in plastic surgery, others in the effects of starvation.Over the next week all were seen by psychiatrists once their immediate physical injuries were addressed. Lots of psychiatrists. And when they weren’t being seen by psychiatrists, they were being seen by FBI agents, and California Highway Patrol investigators, and lawyers from the district attorney’s office.The consensus seemed to be that a number of the Perdido survivors, as they were now known, would be prosecuted for crimes ranging from simple assault to murder.First on that list was Sam Temple.

~ Michael Grant

I used to think a drug addict was someone who lived on the far edges of society. Wild-eyed, shaven-headed and living in a filthy squat.That was until I became one...

~ Cathryn Kemp

What sticks with me now is that this man said he needed to get to a hospital. He probably needed to reach his destination more than anyone else on the bus, yet he lacked the capacity to ride without getting kicked off. Maybe he reached the hospital eventually, and maybe he was connected with social workers and housing specialists who will help him transform his life. But I fear he got on another bus, and another bus after that, without going anywhere at all.

~ Susan Nielsen

Hospital life--with its byzantine array of moving parts layered atop the unpredictable rhythms of illness--is a permanent state of flux.

~ Danielle Ofri

For the next two weeks, the world and all other issues would be omitted. We were two people alone in a hospital room. We allowed no visitors. We had two weeks of near-silence with each other and my increasing helplessness. I tended to tangle the IV and misplace the oxygen tube. As I started to say earlier, I could feel no sensible interest in the future. The moments became extraordinarily dimensionless - not without value but flat and a great deal emptier. When you learn you're fatally ill, time becomes very confusing, perhaps uninteresting, pedestrian. But my not caring if I lived or died hurt Ellen. And I was grateful that I could indulge my cowardice toward death in terms of living for her.

~ Harold Brodkey

The nurses did their best to spruce up the antiseptic corridors but the smell of pine boughs was overpowered by Pine Sol and no one paused beneath the mistletoe on the contagious ward.

~ Robert Zverina

Most of everything is very little of not very much at all.

~ Richard Edward Harding

I just started watching KingDom Hospital series by Stephen King - Pretty Interesting Film. I just continue watching the series 11.22.63 incrediable film. It's wonderful that you can go in the past, who doesn't want to do this?

~ Deyth Banger

I went out into the corridor. I asked a nurse if she knew where the people with arthritis went. She said lots of them went to Ward 34 on the top floor. She said she thought that was a silly place to put people with bad bones who had such trouble walking and climbing stairs.

~ David Almond

I was scared...and did not know what was coming for me next.

~ Sarah Todd Hammer

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and - needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle - a jab into a vein...(For The Rest Of Her Life)

~ Cornell Woolrich

Food wasn’t one of the amenities at Cooper, the five-hundred-bed hospital on which millions of poor people depended. Nor was medicine. “Out of stock today” was the nurses’ official explanation. Plundered and resold out of supply cabinets was an unofficial one. What patients needed, families had to buy on the street and bring in.

~ Katherine Boo

By listening to the “unspoken voice” of my body and allowing it to do what it needed to do; by not stopping the shaking, by “tracking” my inner sensations, while also allowing the completion of the defensive and orienting responses; and by feeling the “survival emotions” of rage and terrorwithout becoming overwhelmed, I came through mercifully unscathed, both physically and emotionally. I was not only thankful; I was humbled and grateful to find that I could use my method for my own salvation.While some people are able to recover from such trauma on their own, many individuals do not. Tens of thousands of soldiers are experiencing the extreme stress and horror of war. Then too, there are the devastating occurrences of rape, sexual abuse and assault. Many of us, however, have been overwhelmed by much more “ordinary” events suchas surgeries or invasive medical procedures. Orthopedic patients in arecent study, for example, showed a 52% occurrence of being diagnosed with full-on PTSD following surgery.Other traumas include falls, serious illnesses, abandonment, receivingshocking or tragic news, witnessing violence and getting into anauto accident; all can lead to PTSD. These and many other fairly commonexperiences are all potentially traumatizing. The inability to reboundfrom such events, or to be helped adequately to recover by professionals,can subject us to PTSD—along with a myriad of physical and emotionalsymptoms.

~ Peter A. Levine

When traveling in rural Africa, it's important to not actually *go* to a hospital until the patient is on the brink of expiration, otherwise things are apt to get worse.

~ Josh Gates

To her despair was added a philosophical dejection, the feeling of every thinker who, venturing an inquisitive finger beneath the velvet of a throne, comes upon the coarse pinewood . . . And then it was she fell victim to a still more painful disquiet. The dead man they had just carted off, like a lump of matter no longer of any use, made it hideously plain how closely hospitals resemble factories. Under the scalpel, living flesh is treated there like wood under the plane or steel under the rolling-mill.

~ Maurice Renard

Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

~ Jacob M. Appel

We are not able to express ourselves in a hospital, even when seriously ill, we don�t have time.

~ Julio Pereira

My book contains texts that I wrote during college, medical school and during my residency of neurosurgery. I could set the book �Thoughts from the hospital as clippings thoughts

~ Julio Pereira

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation.

~ Ernest Hemingway

$13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.

~ Frank A. Oski

I slowly climbed back to my feet, walked back into the emergency department through the silently swishing glass doors, and, covered in my girlfriend's blood, lied perfectly for the first time in my life. I tried to stop her.

~ Maggie Stiefvater

Lady, you have the wrong number. Our cat isn't even in the hospital. He doesn't want pajamas.

~ Jenny Lawson

Or maybe watching you enjoy a carefree summer while you fell in love was what kept me out of the hospital in the first place.

~ Nicholas Sparks

The hospital room was as cold as dead skin, the hallway crowded with lost souls and reeking of illness.

~ Raquel Cepeda

Morbidity and Mortality RoundsForgive me, body before me, for this.Forgive me for my bumbling hands, unschooledin how to touch: I meant to understandwhat fever was, not love. Forgive me formy stare, but when I look at you, I seemyself laid bare. Forgive me, body, forwhat seems like calculation when I takea breath before I cut you with my knife,because the cancer has to be removed.Forgive me for not telling you, but I’mno poet. Please forgive me, please. Forgivemy gloves, my callous greeting, my unease—you must not realize I just met deathagain. Forgive me if I say he lookedimpatient. Please, forgive me my despair,which once seemed more like recompense. Forgivemy greed, forgive me for not having moreto give you than this bitter pill. Forgive:for this apology, too late, for thoselike me whose crimes might seem innocuousand yet whose cruelty was obvious.Forgive us for these sins. Forgive me, please,for my confusing heart that sounds so muchlike yours. Forgive me for the night, when Isleep too, beside you under the same moon.Forgive me for my dreams, for my rough knees,for giving up too soon. Forgive me, please,for losing you, unable to forgive.

~ Rafael Campo

Working on the summit of Mauna Kea was comparable to working on the hospital pulmonary ward with sick people sucking on oxygen cylinders.

~ Steven Magee

I finally made eye contact with the boy in the bed. He lay on his side, a tube in his nose and another in his vein. His cheeks were sunken, and his skin was ghostly pale. His hair might have been blond, but it was fading into a gray, making it hard to tell. The only part of this boy that held any life at all were his eyes, which brimmed with tears when he saw me.“Kahlen?”I sat still. These three people all called me by the same name, which sounded sort of like Katlyn and Ellen and made me believe that maybe they actually knew me.“Where did you go? Where have you been? I thought you were dead.” His chest worked overtime, trying to keep up with his mouth, spilling over with words.“Can you get her a pen? Please?” He lifted an arm weakly. It was all bone. “I just need to know.”“A pen?” I asked.Once again his eyes lit up.“You can talk?”I stared at this boy, at how he was overjoyed at one of the most basic things a person could do. “So it would seem.” I smiled.He flopped onto his back, laughing from his gut, and based on Julie’s tears, I was guessing she’d been waiting a long time for that to come back.

~ Kiera Cass

A hospital alone shows what war is.

~ Erich Maria Remarque

Smartphones can relay patients' data to hospital computers in a continuous stream. Doctors can alter treatment regimens remotely, instead of making patients come in for a visit.

~ Charles C. Mann

I was a very sickly kid. While I was in the hospital at age 7, my Dad brought me a stack of comic books to keep me occupied. I was hooked.

~ Len Wein

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

~ Erma Bombeck

A hospital is no place to be sick.

~ Samuel Goldwyn

The current medical records system is this: Room after room after room in a hospital filled with paper files.

~ Timothy Murphy

Today, medical devices such as catheters and stethoscopes use silver, and every hospital in the western world uses silver sulfadiazine to prevent infections.

~ Robert Kiyosaki

Long gone are the days when hospital stays and surgeries made up the bulk of seniors' annual medical expenses.

~ Jim Gerlach

Procedures outside the stadiums and in the parking areas still need to be optimized, for example so that emergency medical services can leave the grounds on their way to the hospital faster.

~ Otto Schily

Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options.

~ Thomas R. Insel