Operating Room Quotes

The operating room turns you into somebody who's never wrong. Much like writing."
"Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right some day is the perversity that draws you on. ~ Philip Roth

Creativity or talent, like electricity, is something I don't understand but something I'm able to harness and use. While electricity remains a mystery, I know I can plug into it and light up a cathedral or a synagogue or an operating room and use it to help save a life. Or I can use it to electrocute someone. Like electricity, creativity makes no judgment. I can use it productively or destructively. The important thing is to use it. You can't use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have. ~ Maya Angelou

Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely. ~ Jeffrey Kluger

Mundane, boring stories
not interesting ones
are the ideal in an operating room. ~ Wolf Pascoe

I hate stories in which a person has an occupation and you never see him working at it, like all those marvelous Cary Grant movies where he's a surgeon, and you never see him in the operating room. ~ Tom Wolfe

After three hours, I come back to the waiting room. It is a cosmetic surgery office, so a little like a hotel lobby, underheated and expensively decorated, with candy in little dishes, emerald-green plush chairs, and upscale fashion magazines artfully displayed against the wall.
A young woman comes in, frantic to get a pimple "zapped" before she sees her family over the holidays. An older woman comes in with her daughter for a follow-up visit to a face-lift. She is wearing a scarf and dark glasses. The nurse examines her bruises right out in the waiting room.
And you are in the operating room having your body and your gender legally altered. I feel like laughing, but I know it makes me sound like a lunatic. ~ Joan Nestle

When I was twelve, my appendix burst, and as they were wheeling my ass into the operating room, I asked the doctor, "How will this affect my piano playing?" and he said, "Don't worry, you'll still be able to play the piano," and I said, "Wow! I wasn't able to before!" And then they gassed me. ~ John Scalzi

I don't know why I resented it so intensely to have them think of me as something newly minted in their private treasury, but it was-I am certain-echoes of that idea that had been sounding in the chambers of my mind from the time we had arrived in Chicago. I wanted to get up and show everyone what a fool he was, to shout at him: I'm a human being, a person - with parents and memories and a history - and I was before you ever wheeled me into that operating room! ~ Daniel Keyes

I imagined two leather chairs near a fire in a paneled room, where two old soldiers could drink and talk. But she took us into the kitchen. She had put two straight-backed chairs at a kitchen table with a white porcelain top. That table top was screaming with reflected light from a two-hundred-watt bulb overhead. Mary had prepared an operating room. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

I use music in the operating room to help create a healing environment for patients and staff. There is a reason that certain heart rates are healthy and certain beats of music heal and relax us. ~ Bernie Siegel

I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures. ~ Christiaan Barnard

The [living] room was as intimate as an operating room but not as welcoming. ~ Robert B. Parker

As I was wheeled into the operating room I pleaded with
God for one more day, one more week, one more month with her. ~ Ariana Carruth

I've always thought that my exposure to competitive sports helped me a great deal in the operating room. It teaches you endurance, and it teaches you how to cope with defeat, and with complications of all sort. I think I'm a well-coordinated person, more than average, and I think that came through my interest in sports, and athletics ... Playing basketball You have to make decisions promptly, and that's true in the operating room as well. ~ Denton Cooley

I don't know. He was hit hard. Bleeding out his mouth, bright red blood, so he probably took a hit to his lung. He was alive when they took him into the operating room . . ." Lucas gave him the details he had, then gave the phone to the highway patrolman, who knew Wood, and Wood confirmed Lucas's status. ~ John Sandford

Had I been allowed to testify, I would have told them that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area. I would have also informed the Warren Commission about the call I received from Lyndon Johnson while we were operating on Lee Harvey Oswald. President Johnson told me that a man in the operating room would get a deathbed confession from Oswald. ~ Charles A. Crenshaw

One of my surgical giant friends had in his operating room a sign "If the operation is difficult, you aren't doing it right." What he meant was, you have to plan every operation You cannot ever be casual You have to realize that any operation is a potential fatality. ~ Joseph Murray

There are a hell of a lot of jobs that are scarier than live comedy. Like standing in the operating room when a guy's heart stops, and you're the one who has to fix it! ~ Jon Stewart

Making a record is a lot like surgery without an anesthetic. You first have to cut yourself up the middle. Then you have to rip out every single organ, every single part and lay them on a table. You then need to examine the parts, and the reality of the situation hits you. You find yourself saying things like "I didn't know that part was so ugly." Or "I better get a professional opinion about that." You go to bed hollow and then back into the operating room the next day ... facing every fear, every disgusting thing you hate about yourself. Then you pop it all back in, sew yourself shut and perform ... you perform like your life depended on it
and in those perfect moments you find beauty you never knew existed. You find yourself and you friends all over again, you find something to fight for, something to love. Something to show the world. ~ Gerard Way

God would grant all of us wisdom, calm, and peace, that his presence would be in the operating room, and that his will might be done. ~ Benjamin Carson

Miracles happen quietly every day - in an operating room, on a stormy sea, in the sudden appearance of a road side stranger. They are rarely tallied. No one keeps score. ~ Mitch Albom

Code Blue! We're losing him!"
The EMTs hustled the gurney containing Erik Dawson's broken body into the operating room where the surgical team waited. The nursing staff literally ripped his clothes off as they worked to stabilize him.
"What do we have here?" the lead surgeon asked.
His assistant didn't bother to look up as she answered, "Auto accident. An eighteen- wheeler smashed his car into a guardrail."
The lead surgeon whistled through his teeth. "It's a miracle he's still breathing. Let's keep him that way."
As the surgical team moved into action with skill born of practice, Erik drifted on the fringes of consciousness.
Erik's thoughts raced. What? Where?
Anesthesia put him under, but as the doctors began their work and his parents prayed fervently in the waiting room, Erik spasmed and stopped breathing.

Family Matters, from Home Again ~ Maurice M. Gray Jr.

Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute - including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world - the achievement that may have the greatest impact on health care did not occur in the operating room or in the research laboratory. It happened on a piece of paper ... when we created the first-ever packaged pricing plan for cardiovascular surgical procedures. ~ Denton Cooley

A figure held his daughter in the rocker. In the dim light he couldn't make out the features, but the sight of anyone he didn't know sitting in Wendy's rocker with their daughter was enough to scare the shit out of him. Judging by the shuddering movements of his daughter's body it had frightened her too, had caused her to mewl. He wanted to charge forward and reclaim his daughter, but he didn't know what would happen if he acted so quickly. What would he do if it hurt her? What would he do if it killed her? "What-what do you want? I'll do anything just don't take my daughter. She's…all I have left."

The figure stopped rocking and slowly eased its way to its feet. There's not much light in the room but as it moved closer to the bed and it settled the baby in her crib, he saw just enough of her face in the moonlight.

"Wendy?" His voice is as full of horror as it is with awe. He can't help but be horrified at the sight of her now, the way that death has changed her, making her a terrible figure indeed. Her eyes are strange; some depth, some dark and terrible nothing has swallowed up all of her light, and in this first moment he swears he can feel the awful cold of that operating room coming off of her flesh. She is so small and so hard to look at, as if his mind can't quite focus on her form. Through the bars of the crib he can see her anger and hear the terrible, alien sound of her hiss. "What do you want?"
She doesn't answer him, staring cold and bla ~ Amanda M. Lyons

The mood is on me to-night only becuase I have listened to several hours of intelligent conversation and I am not a very brilliant person. Sometimes here on Pequod Island and back again on Beacon Street, I have the most curious delusion that our world may be a little narrow. I cannot avoid the impression that something has gone out of it (what, I do not know), and that our little world moves in an orbit of its own, a gain one of those confounded circles, or possibly an ellipse. Do you suppose that it moves without any relation to anything else? That it is broken off from some greater planet like the moon? We talk of life, we talk of art, but do we actually know anything about either? Have any of us really lived? Sometimes I am not entirely sure; sometimes I am afraid that we are all amazing people, placed in an ancestral mould. There is no spring, there is no force. Of course you know better than this, you who plunge every day in the operating room of the Massachusetts General, into life itself. Come up here and tell me I am wrong. ~ John P. Marquand

Yes, Spring has come!
I felt it yesterday when I looked out the window at the moon over the rooftops, when I breathed in the fresh night air.
This morning I was awoken by the sun, drenched the room with bright warm light.
I opened my eyes, reached out to meet the sun and murmured "Good morning"! ~ Alena Shubina Lis

It was as if the room beyond the blast furnace was a tub and someone had turned the faucets on the cold and hot running snakes. ~ Joe Hill

A new darkness pulled away the room, inked out flesh and outlined bones. My mother was wide awake again. She become sharply herself - bone, wire, antenna - but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow - alone in white not unlike being alone in black. She had also sailed a boat safely between land and land. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

The stranger did not go to church, and indeed made no difference between Sunday and the irreligious days, even in costume. He worked, as Mrs. Hall thought, very fitfully. Some days he would come down early and be continuously busy. On others he would rise late, pace his room, fretting audibly for hours together, smoke, sleep in the armchair by the fire. Communication with the world beyond the village he had none. His temper continued very uncertain; for the most part his manner was that of a man suffering under almost unendurable provocation, and once or twice things were snapped, torn, crushed, or broken in spasmodic gusts of violence. He seemed under a chronic irritation of the greatest intensity. His habit of talking to himself in a low voice grew steadily upon him, but though Mrs. Hall listened conscientiously she could make neither head nor tail of what she heard. ~ H.G.Wells

Audience member: Living Room!
Sara: Kitchen ~ Sara Quin

I hear what they're saying about faith, about the priests at our church and how they relate to women, about the bishops and cardinals above the priests and how they ignore women, about the things they are reading and thinking about. And I realize several things in rapid succession: you can be Catholic and feminist. You can be Catholic and lesbian. You can be Catholic and a straight female and not have kids. You can be Catholic and have children but wonder if they should be Catholic. You can be Catholic and believe in better access to birth control, especially in impoverished and AIDS-ravaged communities. You can be Catholic and female and not be a nun and still be a leader in the church. Women, as it turns out, are part of the priestly class. It's just that they aren't allowed to minister publicly. They do it in places like here, and in hospitals, classrooms, homeless shelters, and in any room, really, where there is someone who needs healing. ~ Kaya Oakes

There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country. There is room here for only 100% Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Ask any teenage girl to describe her perfect bedroom, and you'll get answers like 'a room with a private phone line, a place to hang out with friends, and for it to be way-cool and funky.' Ask parents the same question, and 'a locked door that opens on their 21st birthday' might top the list! ~ Candice Olson

Beckett watched as Kyle danced. "Looks like Fairy Princess has wings."
It was as if she were alone in the room. She owned the space as she combined flying jumps with conventional dance club moves. No one could touch her talent, so they stayed on the perimeter as a backdrop to her unchoreographed show.
"She's always been a beautiful dancer." Livia sat down in a chair that faced the dancefloor and Blake. ~ Debra Anastasia

Without direction, the respiratory technician goes to the head of the bed. She takes the tubing, attaches it to the oxygen, and turns it on as high as it will go. She provides a seal with her hand cupped over the plastic mask, over the nose and mouth of the toddler, and methodically provides oxygenated air. Doyle's tiny chest rises and falls while I listen with my stethoscope. I am reaching for another breathing tube.
"Fib!" Dr. Pedras feels for a pulse while another places gelled pads on her chest. ~ Ruth McLeod-Kearns

My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention. ~ Rosecrans Baldwin

For those with drive, wit, vision, ego and a masochistic outlook, there is always room. ~ K Callan

I think perhaps people have too limited a view of where they can put books. They believe they have to be in a room specified as 'the library.' I think books can be anywhere in a house. Piles of books in corners do not offend me. Putting books in the dining room is a wonderful idea. My idea of heaven would be to dine, as well as to sleep, surrounded by books.
~Robert A.M. Stern, Architect ~ Estelle Ellis

But I wouldn't sit in my room, couldn't allow myself to mourn and mope and weep and sleep. So I would venture out, even if it was an agony ... ~ Sarah J. Maas

When I'm working I don't have room to think about myself and my own issues. It's really freeing. There is no room for me, which is really nice. ~ Charlize Theron

You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew ... ~ Francesca Lia Block

Then you can have me all to yourself! You can keep me in your dark little room
and fuck me stupid. You can own me. it's what you want isn't it? ~ C.J. Roberts

His eyes are so heavy-lidded I can only see a slit of silver gleaming down at me. Then he licks his lips, and a thrill shoots up my spine. I know that look. I love that look. Wes shoves his trousers down. His thick erection slaps my abs. "I want to touch you," I beg. "No." His tone is commanding. It only intensifies the thrill. "Gotta hold you down so you don't go running off again." He gives me another lingering kiss just to drive the point home. And when he finally releases my wrists, he's off the bed before I can reach for him. "Don't move," he whispers, and I go still, watching in near fascination as he charges across the room to where he dropped his wallet. He opens it, extracts one of his handy packets of travel lube, and returns to the bed. "Arms over your head. ~ Sarina Bowen

A few blossoms float into the room. They drop like frayed yellow ribbons on the gray carpet. ~ Eileen Granfors

He looks at me sharply. "You haven't been drinking, have you?"
He's lucky I don't slap him. "I was sitting upstairs in my room, minding my own business, when he showed up at the door. What do you think? Asshat," I add under my breath.
His brow furrows. "What was that? ~ Kristi Cook

What do you do when you're in a room of vampires and the most dangerous one tells you that you
know too much? You bolt. What did I do? I hyperventilated. ~ Tijan

Relationship films are political. If a woman is sitting in a waiting room in an office and a man walks in and sits down, it's a political situation. If he decides to smoke, does he ask her or does he just light up? If he lights up, what does she do? It's politics. ~ Sydney Pollack

Before you begin designing or buying anything, you need to get real and ask yourself: What do you really want to use this room for? What do you want to do in this room but can't now? ~ Nate Berkus

A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! ~ Charles Dickens

I'd always felt that one could read a woman's discontent in the amount of embroidery in her sitting room. It gave me a crowded and nervous feeling to sit among so much frantic stitchery. ~ Amy Stewart

I love you, Jackson James. I love you. I love-"
His arms tightened again and his deep growl rumbling out of his chest silenced me. Our gazes locked. "I need to be in you. Now."
My eyes widened.
"No time to go home." Then he took one of my hands and started walking back toward the hotel entrance.
"Jax?"
He looked down at me, his eyes full of hunger. "No time."
...
We ended up back in the hotel, standing in front of a wide-eyes hotel clerk. "I need a room." Jax said, smacking down his wallet. "Now. ~ J. Lynn

A soap opera character on the bar TV says, "You killed him, you smothered him with doughnuts!" Another character, another scene--she is sitting in a room with a man and an elderly woman--the leas character wonders if she's dead. The man says, No, you're alive," and the other woman hands her a plate of doughnuts.
A commercial comes on. A couple are on a date and the woman's voice-over articulates interior thoughts of what a wonderful guy her friend has set her up with: "He's so cute, and his IQ is higher than my bank balance . . . but she didn't tell me he has . . . Tourette's syndrome. ~ David Byrne

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul. (opening lines) ~ Kate Chopin

When there's no more room in hell, this artifact said, the dead will walk the earth. ~ Stephen King

Different narrative forms naturally lend themselves to different aspects of existence. The novel is ideal for presenting the inner lives of its characters, the play is ideal for showing people in a room talking and movies are ideal for showing large metal objects hurtling through the air. ~ Todd Alcott

Dancing - however you do it, even if it's in your living room - is a great workout. ~ Ciara

The house had another special feature, one that was required for an industrialist in that era. On the second floor, hidden in the second bedroom, known as the family bedroom, was a closet that served as a panic room. This closet had a call box that could be used to alert the police, the fire department, or the hospital. This was no extravagance: Wealthy men received threats of all kinds. In 1889, for example, W.A. received a letter threatening his life if he did not pay the writer $400,000. He didn't pay, but he was prepared for trouble if it arrived. ~ Bill Dedman

You're . . . you're going back to the Marines?" Alston stuttered. "I thought SOCOM was defunct."
"It's MARSOC now," Ty mumbled.
"But that's special operations. You don't have a choice?"
"No. I don't." He studied the orders. "I report in forty-eight hours. Immediate deployment."
Zane stood. His hands shook as he gripped the edge of the desk. Ty looked up, seeking Zane out. Zane could see it in Ty's eyes. There was no choice. No way to wriggle out of it. No way for anyone to save him.
"Oh God, Ty," Zane whispered.
Ty stared at him for a moment longer as the others broke into outraged babbling. Then Ty shook himself. He tossed the packet of orders onto the desk and stalked over to Zane.
He grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him.
The room spun to a halt. The babble ground to a stunned hush.
Ty's hands moved to the small of his back and he held him tight, bending him just enough for Zane to have to wrap his arms around him to keep from falling. He kissed him again. In front of their coworkers. In front of King and Country and anyone who would watch. It was the first purely honest kiss they'd ever shared.
And it was a kiss good-bye. ~ Abigail Roux

We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind ... When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her. ~ Alice Munro

In sum," Midlife said, giving the room his best you-the-jury baritone, "Our defense will be...?" He looked to Matt for the answer/
"Blame the other guy," Matt said.
"Which other guy?"
"Yes."
"Huh?"
"We blame whoever we can," Matt said. "The CFO, the COO, the C Choose-Your-Favorite-Two-Letter-Combination, the accounting firm, the banks, the board, the lower-level employees. We claim some of them are crooks. We claim some of them made honest mistakes that steamrolled."
"Isn't that contradictory?" Midlife asked, folding his hands and lowering his eyebrows. "Claiming both malice and mistakes?" He stopped, looked up, smiled, nodded. Malice and mistakes. Midlife liked the way that sounded.
"We're looking to confuse," Matt said. "You blame enough people, nothing sticks. The jury end up knowing something went wrong but you don't know where to place the blame. We throw facts and figures at them. We bring up every possible mistake, every uncrossed t and dotted i. We act like discrepancy is a huge deal, even if it's not. We are skeptical of EVERYONE. ~ Harlan Coben

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language. ~ Richard Rodriguez