Terminal Quotes

• There is only one terminal dignity - love.

  Helen Hayes

  Love, Glimpse, Dignity

  Guideposts, January 1960.

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• Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness--if you had little time left to live--you would waste precious little of it! Well, I'm telling you...you do have a terminal illness: It's called birth. You don't have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason--or you will never be at all.

  Dan Millman

  Inspirational, Happy, Time

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• Today I arrived by train in New York City, which I'd never seen before, walked through the grandeur of Grand Central Terminal, stepped outside, got my first look at the city and instantly fell in love with it. Silently, inside myself, I yelled: I should have been born here!

  Edward Robb Ellis

  New York, Should Have, Cities

  Edward Robb Ellis, Pete Hamill (1996). “A Diary of the Century: Tales from America's Greatest Diarist”, Kodansha Amer Incorporated

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• Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

  Iain Banks

  Lonely, Night, Car

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• During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with the parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plan hit the ground and exploded. They all died.

  Sebastian Junger

  Death, War, Men

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• We are used to dealing with problems that have a solution and that can be solved in a finite period. But we're at the beginning of a long period of adjustment that does not have a clear-cut terminal point, and in which our wisdom and sophistication and understanding has to be one of the key elements.

  Henry A. Kissinger

  Cutting, Keys, Long

  Source: www.nytimes.com

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• The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.

  Jacques Lacan

  Eye, Evil, Movement

  Jacques Lacan (2004). “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”, p.164, Karnac Books

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• While this has been a private part of my family's life, it is now clear a media story will soon emerge. My father tragically ended his life while battling terminal cancer in 1979.

  Bill de Blasio

  Father, Cancer, Media

  "Bill De Blasio Reveals His Father Committed Suicide During Fight With Terminal Cancer" By Michael McLaughlin, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 30, 2013.

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• The terminal path may, to distinguish it from internuncial common paths, be called the final common path. The motor nerve to a muscle is a collection of such final common paths.

  Charles Scott Sherrington

  Finals, Nerves, May

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• Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey--even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior.

  John Vaillant

  Successful, Animal, Hunting

  John Vaillant (2010). “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival”, p.164, Vintage

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• Hell is out of fashion - institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull. A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.

  J. G. Ballard

  Fashion, Skulls, Heaven

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• The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view and act on death as a dignified moral and godly choice for those suffering with terminal illnesses.

  John Shelby Spong

  Godly, Views, Decision

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• No man is infinitely strong; for every creature that runs, flies, hops or crawls there is a terminal nemesis which he will not circumvent, which will finally do him in.

  Philip K. Dick

  Strength, Running, Strong

  Philip K. Dick (2011). “The VALIS Trilogy”, p.68, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well-something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.

  Peter Medawar

  Science, Ideas, History

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• I thought about the cameras following me in the terminal and pictured my family watching my entrance on TV. I hoped they’d be proud.

  Kiera Cass

  Cameras, Proud, Tvs

  Kiera Cass (2015). “The Selection Series 4-Book Collection: The Selection, The Elite, The One, The Heir”, p.41, HarperCollins

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• For a few minutes, maybe, life lingers in the tissues of some outlying regions of the body. Then, one by one, the lights go out and there is total blackness. And ifsome part of the non—entity we called George has indeed been absent at this moment of terminal shock, away out there on the deep water, then it will return to find itself homeless.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Light, Deep Water, Tissues

  "A Single Man".

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• America as a setting seems inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and I think there's something about the outsider viewpoint that works for me. Being of Jewish descent in England always carried a vague sense of being foreign, while not being a practicing Jew made it hard to think of myself as fully Jewish either. So living here in a way just clarifies that terminal outsider position - makes it somehow official, which I like.

  James Lasdun

  Thinking, America, Viewpoints

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I feel joy when I do a great show. I get fun out of making other people happy. I'm a terminal people-pleaser. I suppose that's why I'm a frontman.

  Ozzy Osbourne

  Fun, People, Joy

  Source: www.gq-magazine.co.uk

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• For the last episode [of Downton Abbey], you'll need some handkerchiefs. I needed handkerchiefs reading it. It wasn't because it necessarily moved me while reading it, but it was the experience of reading it when I realized it was the last time I was ever going to be reading one of those scripts. That was quite terminal.

  Hugh Bonneville

  Reading, Needs, Lasts

  "Hugh Bonneville Talks ‘Downton Abbey’, The Final Season, Julian Fellowes, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. September 28, 2015.

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• If you have a patient in a doctor's office who's just been told they have terminal cancer but there's this operation they could perform right now that might save their lives. ... They have a 90 percent chance of surviving the operation — if you tell them that, they respond one way. If you tell them ... that they have a 10 percent chance of being killed by the operation, they are about three times less likely to have the operation.

  Michael Lewis

  Cancer, Doctors, Office

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Youth no longer inhabit the privileged space, however compromised, that was offered to previous generations. They now occupy a neoliberal notion of temporality of dead time, zones of abandonment and terminal exclusion marked by a loss of faith in progress and a belief in those apocalyptic narratives in which the future appears indeterminate, bleak and insecure.

  Henry Giroux

  Loss, Insecure, Time Zones

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent.

  Randall Robinson

  Country, Thinking, Culture

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 26, 2005.

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• Now we have two choices in life: have sex with the same person forever or risk a terminal disease. Either way, your life is over.

  Andy Kindler

  Sex, Two, Choices

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• Patients rarely die of the disease from which they suffer. Secondary or terminal infections are the real cause of death.

  William Osler

  Real, Suffering, Disease

  St. Bartholomew's Hospital Reports 52: 39 (1916)

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• A reality that is electronic... Once everybody's got a computer terminal in their home, to satisfy all their needs, all the domestic needs, there'll be a dismantling of the present broadcasting structure, which is far too limited and limiting.

  J. G. Ballard

  Home, Reality, Needs

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