"I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime"
About this Quote
Kubler-Ross doesn’t offer comfort here; she offers a bill. The line reads like moral arithmetic: every deed, word, and even thought goes on the ledger, and adulthood is accepting the total without appealing to excuses. Coming from the psychiatrist who helped mainstream conversations about dying, that severity isn’t incidental. It’s an attempt to restore agency at the moment people most want to outsource it to fate, doctors, family, or God.
The specific intent is almost clinical: take responsibility as a form of psychic hygiene. In grief and terminal illness, the mind scrambles to bargain and rewrite history. “Solely responsible” cuts through the bargaining stage with a hard edge, pushing the patient (and the living) toward ownership, not just of actions but of the inner narratives that shape them. The inclusion of “thought” is the tell. She’s not talking about legal culpability; she’s talking about the private rehearsal space where resentment, denial, and self-deception breed. If you are accountable there, you can’t pretend your life happened to you.
The subtext also carries a therapeutic challenge: responsibility is not punishment, it’s leverage. If your choices are yours, your next choice is too, even in a hospital bed. In the context of late-20th-century psychology’s turn toward self-actualization and personal growth, the quote reads as both empowerment and provocation - a refusal to let suffering become a blanket alibi, and a demand to meet mortality with clear-eyed authorship.
The specific intent is almost clinical: take responsibility as a form of psychic hygiene. In grief and terminal illness, the mind scrambles to bargain and rewrite history. “Solely responsible” cuts through the bargaining stage with a hard edge, pushing the patient (and the living) toward ownership, not just of actions but of the inner narratives that shape them. The inclusion of “thought” is the tell. She’s not talking about legal culpability; she’s talking about the private rehearsal space where resentment, denial, and self-deception breed. If you are accountable there, you can’t pretend your life happened to you.
The subtext also carries a therapeutic challenge: responsibility is not punishment, it’s leverage. If your choices are yours, your next choice is too, even in a hospital bed. In the context of late-20th-century psychology’s turn toward self-actualization and personal growth, the quote reads as both empowerment and provocation - a refusal to let suffering become a blanket alibi, and a demand to meet mortality with clear-eyed authorship.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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