The Good Nurse Quotes

“Nobody loves you the way they do when you’re dying.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Access to the vulnerable allowed him to manifest death without dying. He’d learned to kill himself by proxy.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“She was a self-proclaimed “pain in the ass,” which meant she was outspoken and honest,”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Charlie considered it one of the neater equations in life: the world pushed, and the pressure suit pushed back. Charlie”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“These measures were adopted by thirty-five other states. A hospital in compliance with the provisions would not be liable for civil actions that might arise from their reportage. There is no penalty or civil liability for hospitals that fail to comply.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“But that suicide had taught him something. In crisis, whenever he felt cornered or impotent, Charlie’s instinct had always been to subvert those feelings with the threat of death. But in truth, he wasn’t particularly interested in being dead, not personally. His nursing career resolved the paradox. Access to the vulnerable allowed him to manifest death without dying. He’d learned to kill himself by proxy.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“They were asking Cullen to tell them things that Cullen believed he could not tell them. The detectives’ job was to help resolve this paradox for him. They needed to challenge his belief system so deeply that the architecture of his universe failed. Then they needed to rebuild the world into one in which confessing to murder seem like a good option. And the only way to do that was to create a situation where not talking was actually worse.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“His actions were subtle, his effects public. That affirmed him. That pleased him.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Everything ends up on paper in an investigation. Detectives knew that, lawyers—especially former prosecutors—knew that, too. There were printouts, records, memos, date books. You make lists, you make notes in interviews—at the very least, you’ve got names and phone numbers on a piece of paper, so you know who to talk to. A five-month investigation, six suspicious deaths, and a unit’s worth of nurses, and the guy came out without so much as a doodle on a legal pad?”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Each body is a death, but not every death is a crime scene.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“He watched the nurses at the station, stirring their coffees, his coffee, helped by what he did, dependent really but not even knowing it. He”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“But of course, the ultimate effect was death. The only trick was figuring the right dosage.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“He was so much more being anonymous. There was power in that role. Anonymous could deny; anonymous could disappear. Anonymous was an unapologetic mystery, godlike in control.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Not all the nurses noticed at first.7 People die, that’s what happens in a hospital, especially the CCU, and sometimes those deaths seem to come in clusters, but something seemed to have changed. The veteran nurses felt it, a new night wind blowing their patients away. It seemed to some that the codes were almost constant now. And they weren’t ending well. Some”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Stress-relieving impulses like these had driven most of his actions during the previous year. His intervention on behalf of his patients was a compulsion that had little to do with the patients themselves; often, in fact, he failed to notice the patients at all, only their outcomes. Each spasm of control offered a period of relief and afterglow.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“This was him, an earnest health-care professional, lovesick and concerned, the sort of foolish heart who had told the policeman that he’d drive right over and did just that, on time. He figured that later, when the pills kicked in, he’d be Romeo, overwhelmed with love and poison, right on stage. The”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“But for all his suicide gestures, the fact was that Charlie wouldn’t kill himself, not really; the nuns in Catholic school had taught him that suicide was a sin, and Charlie didn’t want to end up in purgatory.10 But he could make himself sick, and in many ways, sick was better. Nobody loves you the way they do when you’re dying.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“They were still trying when, all of a sudden, Charles Cullen simply went away. The problems with the insulin spikes disappeared with him.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“It never ends well for saints, no matter how good they are. Castration, defenestration, hot pincers, prison—the saint is a scapegoat, a martyr, a patsy. Barnabas was stoned to death,8 but his story lived beyond him. Every Catholic knew his name. It was the paradox of the saints, one thing Charlie held on to from his childhood: remembered well, remembered forever, but only after being hated to death.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Over the course of his sixteen years, Charles Cullen had been the subject of dozens of complaints and disciplinary citations, and had endured four police investigations, two lie detector tests, perhaps twenty suicide attempts, and a lock-up, but none had blemished his professional record.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Luckily, the past decade had seen a double-digit population influx into the Lehigh Valley. Hospitals blossomed along the old coal seams like mushrooms in rot.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Certainty could only come from the science.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“It was chemistry, not magic. No elevated C-peptide meant that the insulin wasn’t human.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Humor and gossip provided a buffer against the suffering and grief that came with the job,”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Like many nurses, Amy saw herself as a hero defending humanity’s most fragile, an advocate and”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder

“Experts with an intimate knowledge of the case say that the real number of his total victims is likely closer to four hundred.”
― Charles Graeber, The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder