Quote

Nurses never tell you what they know. They're hired for their cheeriness and the thickness of their hair. They need to look alive and healthy, to give the patients something to aim for.

Jenny Downham

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Jenny Downham
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: January 1
Actor
Author
Film Actor
Novelist
Writer
Inner and Outer London
Something
Alive
Nurses
Never
Tell
Hired
Give
Patients
Look
Nurse
Looks
Aim
Need
Patient
Giving
Healthy
Needs
Hair
Thickness

More quotes by Jenny Downham

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Don't pretend to care. I don't need you as an anesthetic.
Jenny Downham
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Perhaps I'm dead. Perhaps this is all it will be. The living will carry on in their world – touching, walking. And I'll continue in this empty world, tapping soundlessly on the glass between us.
Jenny Downham
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Keep breathing. Just keep doing it. It's easy. In and out.
Jenny Downham
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I made a fatal error thinking he could save me.
Jenny Downham
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If I learnt anything at all about terminal illness in my research, it's that the experience is different for everyone. I do believe that life becomes concentrated when it's boundaried and that death is the biggest boundary of all.
Jenny Downham
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Are you afraid, Tessa?
Jenny Downham
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I miss him as soon as he goes. When he isn't with me, I think I made him up.
Jenny Downham
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I'm here. Soon I won't be. Zoey's baby is here. Its pulse tick-ticking. Soon it won't be. And when Zoey comes out of that room, having signed on the dotted line, she'll be different. She'll understand what I already know- that death surrounds us all. And it tastes like metal between you teeth.
Jenny Downham
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when I was four I almost fell down the shaft of a tin mine and when I was five the car rolled over on the motorway and when I was seven we went on holiday and the gas ring blew out in the caravan and nobody noticed I've been dying all my life
Jenny Downham
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I want you to be with me in the dark. To hold me. To keep loving me. To help me when I get scared. To come right to the edge and see what's there.
Jenny Downham
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Every few years we disappear, Zoey. All our cells are replaced by others. Not a single bit of me is the same as when I was last in this room.
Jenny Downham
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As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, young offender's units, youth clubs and housing estates.
Jenny Downham
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I shrug him off. 'Can't you just go away? There's a moment. It has a sound in it, as if something very small got broken.
Jenny Downham
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Parents don't know their children at all. No one knows anyone, in fact.
Jenny Downham
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I've always wanted to be a cat. Warm and domesticated when you want to be, wild when you don't.
Jenny Downham
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Every seven years our bodies change, every cell. Every seven years, we disappear.
Jenny Downham
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That slow smile again. I love that smile! DId I think he was ugly just now? No, his face is transformed.
Jenny Downham
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When I first saw Ellie, I knew it was her-- she was my fantasy. I didn't want it to be true, but every time I met her it was obvious, and the funny thing was that she was better than the fantasy, like I got more stuff than I'd imagined.
Jenny Downham
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Life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.
Jenny Downham
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Adam strokes my head, my face, he kisses my tears. We are blessed. Let them all go. The sound of a bird flying low across the garden. Then nothing. Nothing. A cloud passes. Nothing again. Light falls through the window, falls onto me, into me. Moments. All gathering towards this one.
Jenny Downham