A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one's allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species... We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died-in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

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

The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one's own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.

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

If we cannot heal in one way, we must learn to heal in another.

The dignity we seek in dying is not to be found in our final weeks, days or moments but in the way we live and how we are seen by those people whose lives we affect.