The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope that we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.

Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.