Breathtaking Quotes

“Boris Johnson delivered an unexpectedly jaunty press conference in which he assured an anxious nation we would ‘turn the tide within the next twelve weeks’ and ‘send coronavirus packing in this country’, as though it were some unwanted door-to-door salesman.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“How can a health service so stripped of spare capacity cope with the demands of a once-ina-lifetime global pandemic? I bite my lip and think longingly of Germany’s twenty-nine intensive care beds per 100,000 people – four times the number of ICU beds in Britain”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“We have a fantastic health service and it is well capable of handling the most tremendous pressures, as everyone knows.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. LEONARD COHEN, ‘Anthem”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“bleak news breaks in the Health Service Journal that Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow has been forced to declare a critical incident after running out of ICU beds.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“with the Prime Minister rushed recently to intensive care where he too is being treated for coronavirus.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“Being protected entails being dehumanised.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“He lies on hospital sheets, but he’s drowning. Behind closed doors, with neither fanfare nor drama, he’s been quietly drowning all night. The act of voicing distress – alerting another human being to his plight – takes spare air he no longer possesses.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“The government’s rapidly constructed pandemic narrative invokes ‘heroism’, the ‘Blitz spirit’, the country ‘coming together’ and yet, in all this noise and bellicose playacting, it seems the residents of hospices have been forgotten, abandoned, as they quietly approach the end of their lives, facing eviction for want of some paper masks.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking

“NHS staff dread winter because nothing quite curdles the soul like pouring your all into a system at breaking point.”
― Rachel Clarke, Breathtaking