Nurses Quotes

“An oncology ward is a battlefield, and there are definite hierarchies of command. The patients, they're the ones doing the tour of duty. The doctors breeze in and out like conquering heroes, but they need to read your child's chart to remember where they've left off from the previous visit. It is the nurses who are the seasoned sergeants -- the ones who are there when your baby is shaking with such a high fever she needs to be bathed in ice, the ones who can teach you how to flush a central venous catheter, or suggest which patient floor might still have Popsicles left to be stolen, or tell you which dry cleaners know how to remove the stains of blood and chemotherapies from clothing. The nurses know the name of your daughter's stuffed walrus and show her how to make tissue paper flowers to twine around her IV stand. The doctors may be mapping out the war games, but it is the nurses who make the conflict bearable.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“The nurses, I have already learned, are the ones who give us the answers we’re desperate for. Unlike the doctors, who fidget like they need to be somewhere else, the nurses patiently answer us as if we are the first set of parents to ever have this kind of meeting with them, instead of the thousandth.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“We will meet people on the way: patients, relatives and staff - people you may recognize already. Because we are all nursed at some point in our lives. We are all nurses.”
― Christie Watson, The Language of Kindness: A Nurse's Story

“The nurses were busybodies, I could hear them scurrying about in the rooms adjacent to ours. They were telling jokes and laughing. Their happiness pissed me off. Stop fucking laughing, I thought, my kokum's lying here dead...She wrote up a report and closed my kokum's eyes, then walked out of the room and summoned a doctor. In the room beside us, another nurse was still laughing. Sometimes I don't like how life goes on. And sometimes I don't think it should.”
― Joshua Whitehead, Jonny Appleseed

“What angels are to the sad, nurses are to the sick.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“How many thousands
of stories like yours
have been told
and forgotten how many
stories of lovingly durable nurses
of hospital sheets of IV tubes
dripping saline and morphine
How many stories of drugs
that would haul you
along in their wake for a while
but finally
let you sink”
― Mark Bibbins, 13th Balloon

“COVID-19 may cause a shortage of doctors and nurses due to students not wanting to enter the biologically hazardous profession.”
― Steven Magee

“Surgical Talk

As we look at the insides of humans,
We find the inside of ourselves
And each other.
What lies beneath us?
What do we believe
About the world and our place in it?
We cut down layer upon layer
And dissect the inner life.”
― Eric Overby, Legacy

“At the very least, to set our healthcare workers, patients, and patient caregivers up for success, we must modernize the systems that guide their work and enable their voices to be heard—especially when they see opportunities to prevent harm and improve care environments.”
― Heidi Raines, Shared Voices: A Framework for Patient and Employee Safety in Healthcare

“The only people who really know anything about medical science are the nurses, and they never tell; they'd get slapped if they did. But the great doctor, he's a divine idiot and a wise man.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Doctors and nurses typically work in very high radiation environments and I would not expect them to have robust immune systems.”
― Steven Magee

“The fatalities of the COVID-19 pandemic are expected to lead to shortages of doctors and nurses.”
― Steven Magee

“Doctors and nurses are brave souls during a pandemic.”
― Steven Magee

“During COVID-19, many doctors and nurses saw more people die than in their entire careers.”
― Steven Magee

“It is important that nurses and doctors know that failing to use legally required health and safety protocols with COVID-19 patients may invalidate their disability and life insurance policies.”
― Steven Magee

“It is important that doctors and nurses understand that willfully using non-sterile personal protective equipment (PPE) may be used to deny their COVID-19 Workers Compensation claim.”
― Steven Magee

“Doctors and nurses are among the most irradiated professions.”
― Steven Magee

“Erase the soldiers and you'll give power to terror - erase the teachers and you'll give power to ignorance - erase the doctors and you'll give power sickness - erase the scientists and you'll give power to regress.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sleepless for Society

“He considered both doctors and nurses as monsters of insensitivity, in spite of the fact that he admired their devotion to duty.”
― Roland Topor, The Tenant

“After I left healthcare, I never worked in the field again.”
― Steven Magee

“I was once abducted by a hospital patient that was under arrest by two police officers! The police officers left him alone with me while they were chatting up the nurses!”
― Steven Magee

“Incompetence: The COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in 2019. It takes three years to train a nurse. In 2022 there is a shortage of nurses. Why wasn’t a massive government funded training program initiated to train huge numbers of nurses in 2019?”
― Steven Magee

“Once you realize the medical profession is heavily corrupted, researching human health becomes so much easier!”
― Steven Magee

“My health research is bad for the businesses of healthcare and the pharmaceutical industries.”
― Steven Magee

“But the center did not hold. Each room was a composite flower's petal exploded out, propelled by fire ... I was dying. Hummingbirds circled my head, separating oxygen from blood with their beaks. I gulped the rich dessert of air. Sandhill cranes flew through the room, way up near the ceiling, their cries growing fainter. I was going the other way. ... Then I heard a nurse say to me: "Don't worry, we won't let you die.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck By Lightning

“Many patients are misdiagnosed by the medical profession.”
― Steven Magee

“The nurses, care givers, doctors, and sanitation workers all around the world deserve more accolades from all us. They make our world beautiful.”
― Avijeet Das

“Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Collin Powell, a Vietnam Vet, then offered one of the most beautiful tributes I've ever heard. "You went, you served, you suffered. The names of eight of your sisters are etched on the wall for having made the supreme sacrifice and yet your service and your sacrifice have been mostly invisible for all these intervening years. When you finished what you had to do, you came quietly home, you stepped back into the background from which you had modestly come. You melted back into a society which for too long now had ignored the vital and endless work that falls to women and is not appreciated as it should be....”
― Diane Carlson Evans, Healing Wounds: A Vietnam War Combat Nurse's 10-Year Fight to Win Women a Place of Honor in Washington, D.C.

“I turn to thank the nurse.
She winks at me coyly,
and suddenly sticks out her tongue.

Just as the doors close,
I see that she's drooling,
and rocking, and rocking and rocking.”
― Sonya Sones, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy

“So what's a nurse? [...]
Basically someone who does all the work of helping people without any of the credit.”
― Zack Schoppen, The Midwizard of Cosconia