Amputation Quotes

To my mind, healing means returning
a malfunctioning human body to full
unrestricted function, not to remove
parts of it by operation or amputation ~ Rudolf Breuss

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.

Before the great slaughter, Collin'd been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn't retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.

And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn't even tried out yet.

Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?

Collin. The poor guy didn't even have time to sort out his thoughts.

In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.

He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren't worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn't equipped to deal with them.

Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots.

But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive.

From the aid station to the ambu ~ Jacques Tardi

But a century from now, your mortal associates will be rotting in the earth, whereas, barring amputation or radical shifts in fashion, you will still be putting your pants on one leg at a time. ~ Jim Butcher

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done ... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

As the saw teeth caught on the bone, she had performed a second surgery, one less bloody but no less brutal, excising from his heart the impulse to run, to cower, to let the man bleed to death rather than face the horror of saving him. The amputation had left both patients lighter. p 121-122 ~ Anthony Marra

The only way to cure an egotist from bragging is by surgery
amputation at the neck. ~ Evan Esar

What's poking me?"
"An involuntary reflex," Jake said, "Roll over at your own risk."
"Is it going to be a chronic condition?"
"God, I hope so, I'm too young to have those kinds of medical issues."
"I have a cure."
"What?" he asked. "Sandwiching a pillow between us?"
"Amputation."
"Never mind," Jake said grimly, "Problem solved. ~ Alison Bliss

At first my father's job was clearing ruins. He had filed a sharp protest, however, justifying his disability over ten pages of closely spaced handwriting, buttressed by statements from witnesses and discharge papers from clinics for nervous diseases. His arguments were irrefutable, particularly if we take into consideration--aside from the actual facts--his polemical tone and his brilliant style. 'I hereby state for the attention of the esteemed Commissarist,' he wrote in his appeal, 'in connection with Item A-2, in which I took the liberty of citing the causes of my total incapacity and proving--if in a very sensible fashion--my abnormality as well as my complete mental and physical worthlessness, the worthlessness of a neurotic and alcoholic incapable of taking care of his family or himself, I hereby state, therefore, with a view to the most specific information possible on this matter, although each and every one of the aforementioned matters is in itself a physical amputation, I am stating that I am also flat-footed, a certificate to which effect I am appending from the draft board at Zalaegerszeg, by which I am exempt from military service by virtue of 100 percent flat-footedness. . . ~ Danilo Kis

One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black. One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that amputation was not necessary--or one may delay the amputation too long. Gangrene is slow, but it is I,possible to be sure that one is reading one's symptoms right. The idea of going through life as a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk if swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. ~ James Baldwin

in an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: "I couldn't really let her come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole."1 Time ~ Octavia E. Butler

Some people are happy that they have each lost one instead of both legs, whereas some are unhappy because they have each lost a toenail. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality. ~ Sam Kean

What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much and act of conceit as it was an act of heroism p 61 ~ Abraham Verghese

This will be a new amputation. You've been a part of my flesh, underneath all my skin. Your removal will bleed and leave me lame for a time. ~ Julie Berry

The Surprise's crew, like most seamen, were a hypochondriacal set of ghouls upon the whole, and they loved a surgical operation almost as much as they loved a prize. But whereas the amputation of a shipmate's arm or leg had disadvantages of which they were fully sensible, a trepanning had none: the patient had but to survive to have all his former powers restored - to be as good as new, with the glory of a silver plate and an anecdote that would last him and his friends to the grave. ~ Patrick O'Brian

Life is lived out in self-contained compartments with nothing to connect them. Their bowing recognizes the sacred. Their expoiting grants the material. In living they desecrate others without a twinge of conscience. Yet if anyone were to hint at desecrating that shrine, his life sould be in peril. Such is the amputation of religion that pays homage to God but would be the most surprised if God were ever to show up. ~ Ravi Zacharias

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, - a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Procrustes in modern dress, the nuclear scientist will prepare the bed on which mankind must lie; and if mankind doesn't fit - well, that will be just too bad for mankind. There will have to be some stretching and a bit of amputation - the same sort of stretching and amputations as have been going on ever since applied science really got going into its stride, only this time they will be a good deal more drastic than in the past. These far from painless operations will be directed by highly centralized totalitarian governments. ~ Aldous Huxley

When you've loved somebody for a long time, and then it stops, it's akin to an amputation in that you go on feeling the cut-off part long after it's been taken away. All sorts of nervous and emotional impulses set out to travel to their accustomed stations, and when they come up against the new, raw barrier, they're carried through it by their own impetus, and only then, finding themselves shooting through empty space, do they dwindle and die away. ~ Lynne Reid Banks

The death of a beloved is an amputation. ~ C.S. Lewis

There was no fast and painless way to perform an amputation, Tessia knew. Not if you did it properly. ~ Trudi Canavan

This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level. ~ Gabriel Marcel

It was typical, he thought, that it had come to this. One minute he was happily selling forged certificates and making good money and the next he was forced to choose between torture, amputation or leaping into a pile of corpses. It was the kind of thing which always seemed to be happening to him. ~ C.S. Quinn

The code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylon prescribed this
punishment for a doctor convicted of inept surgery: amputation
of the hands. ~ L. M. Boyd

Can't we go another way?"
"Nope. Only way to reach the green grass of Oregon or the sweet gold of California is through hell itself."
I roll my eyes. The Major has been especially colorful since his amputation, cussing and exaggerating and telling tall tales. He reminds me of Daddy, except not fit for female company. ~ Rae Carson

Mr Earbrass stands on the terrace at twilight. It is bleak; it is cold; and the virtue has gone out of everything. Words drift through his mind: anguish turnips conjunctions illness defeat string parties no parties urns desuetude disaffection claws loss Trebizond napkins shame stones distance fever Antipodes mush glaciers incoherence labels miasma amputation tides deceit mourning elsewards ... ~ Edward Gorey

Pop's leg was across the room when I came downstairs. ~ Kathryn Miller Haines

In the case of smokers, the abuse leads to death, sicknesses, cancer, amputation, loss of all kinds. ~ Sunday Adelaja

It's nothing personal, but anyone who engages me must inevitably experience amputation. ~ Reki Kawahara

One can't run in a park without a dog or make angels in the snow without a child and there are things one can't do without a lover, so the loss of the lover is like an amputation and the patient goes into shock. ~ Merle Shain

It is not simply what one remembers, but why. There are sites of amputation where the past is severed from the body of the present. Remembering only encourages the growth of phantom limbs. And it is not simply what one remembers, or why, but what to do with what one remembers, which of the scattered pieces to carry forward, what to protect and preserve, what to leave behind. ~ Camilla Gibb

A clean break, like an amputation. Eventually, you realized you could survive without all your limbs, that you could function and even thrive, because human beings were designed to take a battering. And though you weren't whole, you at least had a son. And though it sometimes seemed as if your heart had stopped beating, you at least knew that somewhere in the world, another heart was beating for you. ~ Beatriz Williams

When Christians are caught in sin, they do not need isolation or amputation; they need restoration. The proper thing to do is to help them confess their sins and find forgiveness in Christ, and then welcome them back into the fellowship of the church. ~ Philip Graham Ryken

But in our wholeness, we became overly proud. In our pride, we neglected to worship the gods. The mighty Zeus punished us for our neglect by cutting all the double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented humans in half, thereby creating a world of cruelly severed one-headed, two-armed, two-legged miserable creatures. In this moment of mass amputation, Zeus inflicted on mankind that most painful of human conditions: the dull and constant sense that we are not quite whole. For the rest of time, humans would be born sensing that there was some missing part - a lost half, which we love almost more than we love ourselves - and that this missing part was out there someplace, spinning through the universe in the form of another person. We would also be born believing that if only we searched relentlessly enough, we might someday find that vanished half, that other soul. Through union with the other, we would recomplete our original form, never to experience loneliness again.
This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal two. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Do not chase boys. Chasing boys is bad. Chasing boys can lead to horrible things like mansions going up into flames, hand amputations, and blindness. So have some self respect and don't let things get too far before the wedding day. ~ Meg Cabot

I found, when circulating chapters from this book, that some readers feel I am too hard on heterosexuality. I do not mean to be coming out against it. I simply do not see why the nation has to have an official sexuality, especially one that authorizes the norm of a violent gentility; that narrows the field of legitimate political action; that supports the amputation of personal complexity into categories of simple identity; that uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote shame for non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship. This is the heterosexuality I repudiate. ~ Lauren Berlant

I think any break-up from a long relationship has this accompanying feeling of who am I without this person. You feel like a half-person because you've integrated yourself into an idea of a couple for so long, and then teasing that out and finding out who you are without them, it just takes a while. It feels like an amputation. ~ Greta Gerwig

We watch the chef slice eel and octopus, delicate operations of dismemberment and amputation. For some reason it makes me think of poetry. ~ Jessica Martinez

Then I'll say that I once cut the living, beating heart out of my own chest," she said, her voice devoid of its usual flippancy. "I survived that amputation. I'll survive this one. ~ Tiffany Reisz

I am happy to be able to be part of this Rock'n'Blues Fest as the first tour since the amputation of my right leg. I hope this gives me a leg up on the new year! ~ Leslie West

Back when I'd been sick, I'd always dreaded hearing other words. Spread. Lymph nodes. Amputation. Those words, those possibilities, make you grow up quick. They made me remember to prioritize correctly, to value and appreciate. But mainly the branches of those words scared me so much, I wanted to live even if it wasn't always going to be fun and games. ~ Mariana Zapata

Violet had carefully chosen some long-hanging, loose-fitting basketball shorts to wear over her swimsuit, in hopes of keeping her injuries at least partially hidden. But it didn't take long before one . . . and then two . . . and then at least twenty of her friends had noticed her bandages peeking out from beneath the swishing fabric, and she was forced to recount her morning accident.
Jay loved hearing her tell the story, and every time he heard her talking about it, he would come over so that he could interject, and of course embellish, his role in the events. In his version, he was her champion, practically carrying her from the woods and performing near-miraculous medical feats to save her legs from complete amputation. Violet, and annoyingly every other girl within earshot, couldn't help but giggle while he jokingly sang his own praises.
Violet happened to walk up just in time to hear Jay recounting his version once more to a group of eager admirers.
"Hero? I wouldn't say hero . . ." he quipped.
Violet rolled her eyes, turning to Grady Spencer, a friend of theirs from school. "Can you believe him?"
Grady gave her a concerned look. "Seriously, are you okay, Violet? It sounds like it was pretty bad."
Violet was embarrassed that Jay's exaggerations were actually dredging up real sympathy from others. "It's fine," she assured him, and when Grady didn't look convinced, she added, "Really, I just tripped."
She reached out and shoved Jay. "Wil ~ Kimberly Derting