Quotes About Control

In other words, people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation and to spare their family anguish. A

This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

HOW DID WE wind up in a world where the only choices for the very old seem to be either going down with the volcano or yielding all control over our lives?

Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

where they had control--their skills, for example--these doctors sought betterment. They understood themselves to be part of a larger world of medical knowledge and accomplishment. Moreover, they believed they could measure up in it...partly...a function of...camaraderie as a group.

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible

I tried to proceed deliberately, and not let panic take hold.

I AM LEERY of suggesting the idea that endings are controllable. No one ever really has control. Physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But the point is that we are not helpless either. Courage is the strength to recognize both realities.

Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It's been replaced by veneration of the Independent self.

his own failure to be at her bedside when things got out of control.

There is persistent, poor anger control or abusive behavior.

Most doctors, taking seriously the idea that patients should control their own fates, lay out the options and the risks involved.

The aged did not lose status and control so much as share it. Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It

Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them. The

In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous – they suck you in and pretend not to notice.

Hey Ma, how come you never hit us until we were bigger'n you?" At that moment realizing I guess I never hit my kids when they were little for the same reason my father never hit me: because we were afraid that our rage at the world in which we lived might leak out to contaminate and destroy someone we loved.

As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.

Muriel and I talked about love as a voluntary commitment, while we each struggled through the steps of an old dance, not consciously learned, but desperately followed. We had learned well in the kitchens of our mothers, both powerful women who did not let go easily. In those warm places of survival, love was another name for control, however openly given

The white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what we think - between poetry and theory. We are easier to control when one part of ourselves is split from another, fragmented, off balance.

If the child is not mine I have no control over her and don't want to have any, and that is precisely what you do want, isn't it? But perhaps you want even more—to have power over the child, but still have me to support you. LAURA.

LAURA. Suppose that I was prepared to bear anything, even to being despised and driven out, everything for the sake of being able to keep and control my child, and that I am truthful now when I declare that Bertha is my child, but not yours. Suppose—— CAPTAIN.