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Suzanne Gordon Quotes

Nursing may be the oldest art, but in the contemporary world, it is also one of the most invisible. One of the most invisible arts, sciences, and certainly one of the most invisible parts of our health care system.

Nursing may be the oldest art, but in the contemporary world, it is also one of the most invisible. One of the most invisible arts, sciences, and certainly one of the most invisible parts of our health care system.

Suzanne Gordon
Art, Nursing, Nurse
Suzanne Gordon (2012). “Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines”, p.19, Cornell University Press

Divorce is one of the loneliest of modern rituals. Before, during, and after the actual culmination of the legal process it is an ordeal that rips people away from their roots, their important relationships, and a part of themselves. There is really nothing like it - except perhaps war.

Suzanne Gordon
Rip, War, Divorce
Suzanne Gordon (1976). “Lonely in America”

America must deal once and for all with an utterly irrational health care financing system that allows private interests to make billions in profits from the pain and suffering of their fellow citizens. America is the only country in the industrialized world that does not provide tax-supported universal health care coverage in some form.

Suzanne Gordon
Country, Pain, America
Suzanne Gordon, Claire M. Fagin (2007). “Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines”, p.308, Cornell University Press

Today age segregation has passed all sane limits. Not only are fifteen-year-olds isolated from seventy-year-olds but social groups divide those in high school from those in junior high, and those who are twenty from those who are twenty-five. There are middle-middle-age groups, late-middle-age groups, and old-age groups - as though people with five years between them could not possibly have anything in common.

Suzanne Gordon
School, Years, People

In our 'don't just sit there, do something' culture, when we get sick we are supposed to become characters in a heroic medical narrative that conceals the remorselessness of pathology, the intractable fact of human vulnerability, and the inevitable inadequacies of medicine. To many of the participants in the medical drama, aggressive treatment - even when it fails - represents a quasi-religious quest for immortality and meaning.

Suzanne Gordon
Religious, Drama, Character

The association between failure, loneliness, and solitude is so strong in our culture that people often find it difficult to believe that there are some who like being by themselves.

Suzanne Gordon
Strong, Loneliness, Believe
Suzanne Gordon (1976). “Lonely in America”, Touchstone

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