There is all the difference in the world between teaching children about religion and handing them over to be taught by the religious.
Polly ToynbeeRead
My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the struggle of facing death and the desire for autonomy in dying.
Polly Toynbee's quote poignantly illustrates the complex emotions surrounding terminal illness and the deep wish for control at the end of life. It captures the difficult reality that, despite a loved one's desire for peace and choice in their departure, circumstances may render such wish impossible, leaving caregivers in a place of helplessness and sorrow.
Themes
DeathAutonomyCaregivingTerminal IllnessStruggle
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about end-of-life care and patient autonomy.
More from Polly Toynbee
All quotes →Similar quotes
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
Louise ErdrichRead
Some of your griefs you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you've endured From evils that never arrived.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
When it was over, she gathered him in her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life. That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother had been alive. That had been her sin. And this was her penance. Wanting to live when everyone else seemed dead.
Melina MarchettaRead
I am older than everyone I ever knew. All my dogs are dead. Half a dozen cats, parakeets... all gone.
Arthur MillerRead
I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that.
Agatha ChristieRead
As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.
Karin SlaughterRead