Vegetative State Quotes

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

Present law has a process to ascertain whether or not a patient is in a persistent vegetative state, and it should not matter what politicians think.

I don't want to be the passively alert vegetable in the corner that takes in everything but can't communicate, which I think would suck a lot of life out of my family without giving very much to me.

Without civilization, we would not turn into animals, but vegetables.

You know, some people think since I can't move I am a vegetable. Wrong. Just picture yourself as you are, just always sitting down and if you need something a hot babe takes care of you. I am exaggerating a little, but this is how I see it.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

There are ten thousand people in the United States in a persistent vegetative state. Just enough to start a small town. Think of them as veggie-burghers.

I wasn’t going anywhere and neither was the rest of the world. We were all just hanging around waiting to die and meanwhile doing little things to fill the space. Some of use weren’t even doing little things. We were vegetables.

A woman (Terri Schiavo) was healthy. There was brain damage, there was no question. But from a health point of view, she was not terminally ill.

How’s the patient?” asked Derby. “Dead to the world.” “But not actually dead.” “No.” “How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

I would not want to live with a tube in my neck and not be able to move a finger. I wouldn't - that to me is not life.

Congress called a special session to debate the treatment of a woman in a persistent vegetative state on a day that 20,000 children died in the third world.

When I was 11 years old, I got very sick and slipped into a vegetative state for four years and was pretty much written off as a lost cause.

And then they sign an affidavit swearing that she's not in a vegetative stage. I'll tell you. That's a doctor you really want; they can look at a picture and make a diagnosis.

Love was more than blind. It was deaf and dumb, too. It was catatonic. It was vegetative.

The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me - that, I think, would be terrifying.

Some people wait constructively; they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others - I am one of them - abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.

the incredible new medical technology has made it possible for highly disciplined teams of surgeons ... to keep stricken organisms alive even if the brain is irretrievably damaged or lung and heart incapable of functioning without mechanical help. Now it is not dust to dust, but human to vegetable.