Scalpel Quotes

It's funny the things people say when someone dies.
He's in a better place.
How do you know that?
Life goes on.
That's supposed to comfort me? I'm excruciatingly aware that life goes on. It hurts every damned second. How lovely to know it's going to continue like this. Thank you for reminding me.
Time heals.
No, it doesn't. At best, time is the great leveler, sweeping us all into coffins. We find ways to distract ourselves from the pain. Time is neither scalpel nor bandage. It is indifferent. Scar tissue isn't a good thing. It's merely the wound's other face. ~ Karen Marie Moning

I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke's liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one's looking. ~ Peter Watts

The scalpel is the greatest proof of the failure of medicine. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

They tended to wield the huge blunt ax of the law in circumstances that required the delicate scalpel of common sense. [ ... ] Policeman with their great big boots were not required here on a night like this. It would be a good idea to put a thumbtack under the ponderous feet of Justice. ~ Terry Pratchett

A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch. ~ Michael Ondaatje

This is the first step in using the truth as a scalpel: You find that the injustice that created a wound is no longer true, right now, in this moment. You discover that perhaps what you believe hurt you so badly was never true. Even if it was true, it doesn't mean that now it is true. By using the truth, you open the wound and see the injustice from a new perspective. ~ Miguel Ruiz

...The world's benefactor has no choice; he is the surgeon who wields the healing scalpel. He does not want the violence, but the reality (which he has invented) drives him to use violence, in a way, against his will. Throwing a bomb into a crowded department store thus becomes an act of revolutionary love for mankind (and, in general, to quote Lübbe again, 'his primary intention is not to throw bombs into department stores or police stations, but rather into public consciousness.') ~ Paul Watzlawick

You can't find the soul with a scalpel. ~ Gustave Flaubert

If the poet would avoid pepsis in his patients, his scalpel must be as clean as the surgeon's. ~ Austin O'Malley

Instead of focusing the traditional planning cycles where companies benchmark their businesses against existing competition, teams need to be developed to foster internal change and disruption. Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel. ~ Jay Samit

The scalpel is better for operations, but it is no good for anything else. Poetry confines itself more and more to what only poetry can do; but this turns out to be something which not many people want done. Nor, of course, could they receive it if they did. Modern poetry is too difficult for them. It is idle to complain; poetry so pure as this must be difficult. But neither must the poets complain if they are unread. When the art of reading poetry requires talents hardly less exalted than the art of writing it, readers cannot be much more numerous than poets. If you write a piece for the fiddle that only one performer in a hundred can play you must not expect to hear it very often performed. The musical analogy is no longer a remote one. ~ C.S. Lewis

I am the scalpel that cuts out infection, and the heartbreak that makes men wiser. ~ Simon R. Green

Paradox is the sharpest scalpel in the satchel of science. Nothing concentrates the mind as effectively, regardless of whether it pits two competing theories against each other, or theory against observation, or a compelling mathematical deduction against ordinary common sense. ~ Hans Christian Von Baeyer

Words can be as irrevocable as an action. They can cut as deeply as a surgeon's scalpel. ~ Gina Barreca

The healer and the killer both rely on the blade: the physician his scalpel, the assassin his dagger. ~ Fiona Paul

For me, not knowing your theme until your finished is like using a scalpel to turn a kangaroo into Miss Universe – there will be a lot of deep cuts, and there's a high chance it won't work. ~ David G. Allen

Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random ... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel. ~ Stephen King

Did any of you ever see Doctor Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance as a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: "I don't give them time to die", he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. "Fucking undisciplined cells!" he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter. ~ William S. Burroughs

The black panic, that's what woke me; that all too familiar blend of terror and heinousness that buzzed beneath my skin where no eye could detect it and no scalpel could dig it out, where it would remain until I exorcised it out of me. Last night's memories were making their entrance. ~ Alistair Cross

Good enough?"
"Well...yeah," Linc says, the scalpel hanging limp in his hand. He looks mildly disappointed.
"Don't worry. The opportunity to cut me could still present itself someday," Daniel says. ~ Heather Hildenbrand

Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn't count at school because it didn't get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of Design and Technology, a free A level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink on to a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls. ~ Mark Haddon

Like a surgeon's scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It can uplift us, and it can destroy us. Just as there are healthy and damaging forms of confidence, and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also healthy and damaging forms of hope. And the difference between the two is not always clear. ~ Mark Manson

So-called restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge. ~ Alexander Eliot

Dramatic and sudden changes in the body's frequency result in great pain and damage. In such cases, treatment must involve equal or stronger frequencies to be effective -- often having to do with the scalpel. Sharp instruments, by nature, have a higher frequency... ~ Masaru Emoto

You haven't given me any ink," he said.
"Oh, you won't need ink," said Professor Umbridge with the merest suggestion of a laugh in her voice.
Harry placed the point of the quill on the paper and wrote: I must not tell lies.
He let out a gasp of pain. The words had appeared on the parchment in what appeared to be shining red ink. At the same time, the words had appeared on the back of Harry's right hand, cut into his skin as though traced there by a scalpel - yet even as he stared at the shining cut, the skin healed over again, leaving the place where it had been slightly redder than before but quite smooth.
Harry looked around at Umbridge. She was watching him, her wide, toadlike mouth stretched in a smile.
"Yes?"
"Nothing," said Harry quietly. ~ J.K. Rowling

As soon as we touch the complex processes that go on in a living thing, be it plant or animal, we are at once forced to use the methods of this science [chemistry]. No longer will the microscope, the kymograph, the scalpel avail for the complete solution of the problem. For the further analysis of these phenomena which are in flux and flow, the investigator must associate himself with those who have labored in fields where molecules and atoms, rather than multicellular tissues or even unicellular organisms, are the units of study. ~ John Jacob Abel

[Mindfulness] is not concerned with anything transcendent or divine. It serves as an antidote to theism, a cure for sentimental piety, a scalpel for excising the tumor of metaphysical belief. (130) ~ Stephen Batchelor

Forgiveness is a scalpel that removes emotional scars. ~ Maxwell Maltz

Seriously, would you want some strange dude with
a scalpel down near your lady parts?"

She shuddered. "I can think of better uses for a dude
down near my lady parts. ~ Amy Andrews

The scalpel won't make you happy. ~ Demi Moore

I could teach an eighth-grader in twenty minutes how to brief a case. Yet for all three years in most law schools the casebook method of learning the law is still in. The matriculating young lawyer is as qualified to represent a client with the education he has suffered through as a doctor who has never seen a patient, who has never held a scalpel in his hand and who learns surgery by having read text books about it and becomes skilled in surgery, if ever, after having stacked up piles of corpses who represent his pathetic learning process. ~ Gerry Spence

To think creatively, to struggle with an opaque text or confounding idea, to seek connections between periods of history or disciplines of thought, and to search for the precise word or the right rhythm for a single sentence - these are human actions every bit as worthy as the wielding of a hammer, the manipulation of a surgical scalpel, or the making of a courtroom argument. ~ Roger Lundin

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails.
She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew. ~ William Gibson

To look it at another way, surely there are many unfortunate people who have needed to undergo multiple stomach surgeries. Yet no one would hand a scalpel over to them and ask them to perform the same surgery they received on another person, simply because they themselves had undergone it so often. ~ Kato Lomb

In golf, driving is a game of free-swinging muscle control, while putting is something like performing eye surgery and using a bread knife for a scalpel. ~ Tommy Bolt

There is indeed power in words. Most of the lasting change that has been forged in the history of this world came not from a wielding of the swift and bloody sword of battle but from the shaping scalpel of ideas, and what are ideas without the words to deliver them? ~ Mark Dunn

The only reason Lenz didn't burst out laughing was because he wasn't alone; his movement - which seemed hidden now inside a second glove, the body of the injured soldier - were mockeries of themselves. Lenz felt as though he was engaged in a kind of manual labour that for him, deep down, was like manipulating shapes in clay or working a piece of wood. Any feelings of empathy were dissolved in professional expertise and in the recognition of his triumph in relation to the body lying on the stretcher. Lenz was alive, on his feet, with his reason intact, and still in control of the use of language: in that room he was the person who determined every Yes and every No - and he had long known that controlling such extreme words was a source of undisputable power.
A startled nurse was asking Dr. Lenz whether he wanted her to pass him another scalpel, one with a fine point, and Lenz replied: No. No, no. Yes, yes,yes.
Let us say that "organic craftsmanship," the most basic craftsmanship, often filled him with enthusiasm. Lenz knew that bullets or bomb shrapnel - in short, all the pieces of metal that find their way into our bodies - were only looking for what any living creature looks for: a shelter, a final home, a home where they can be left alone, where they feel secure. ~ Gonçalo M. Tavares

If Gretchen had been feeling charitable she would have let me die ... I wanted to die. I was ready to die. If she had put a scalpel in my hand, I would have stabbed myself in the neck and happily bled to death right there in her basement. She didn't do me any favours by not killing me. Gretchen enjoys people's pain. And she just found a way to prolong my pain and her pleasure. Believe me, it was the cruellest thing she could have done to me. If she could have thought of something crueller she would have done it. Gretchen doesn't show people mercy. ~ Chelsea Cain

I can snap open corsets faster than bones." He held his knife up, his attention fixed on my chest. "Interested in a demonstration, fancy lady? Say the word and I'll show you what else I can do with such a fine figure."
Liza stiffened beside me. People often called women of supposedly questionable morals "fancy ladies." If he thought I'd blush and run off, he was sorely mistaken.
"Unfortunately, sir, I find I'm not terribly impressed." I casually slipped a scalpel from my wristlet clutch, enjoying the familiar feel of it. "You see, I also eviscerate bodies. But I don't bother with animals. I butcher humans. Would you care for a demonstration? ~ Kerri Maniscalco

It's Major Ketchup in the bathroom with the laser scalpel."
"Hmm." He sliced a delicately herbed spear of asparagus. "Obviously we were meant for each other as I can interpret that as you meaning something more like Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick. ~ J.D. Robb

She had no sense of time, of what day it was, or anything beyond the bed she was on and the unceasing battle she fought with the Great Bitch of Pain.
The nurses talked to her, too, explaining over and over what had happened to her, what they were doing, why they were doing it. She didn‟t care, so long as they delivered the drugs that kept the Great Bitch at bay. Of course, there came a time - way too soon, by her way of thinking - when her surgeon ordered a decrease in the drugs. He wasn‟t the one in agony, with his sternum cut in two, so what did he care? He was the one wielding the saw and scalpel, not the one on the receiving end. She had only a vague idea which of her visitors was the surgeon, but as her mind began clearing she memorized some particularly salty things she wanted to say to him. Okay, so he'd had to cut her sternum in half, but cutting her drugs in half? Bastard. ~ Linda Howard

So age after age - will it be soon, O Lord? -

Beneath the scalpel of nature and art,

Our spirit screams, our flesh depletes itself,

Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense.

("The Sixth Sense") ~ Nikolay S. Gumilev

I want the pain of knowing them, and by extension myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red-hot and sterilized in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside of me. ~ Isaac Marion

You're a tool, to be used and directed for the good of the people. Sometimes you'll be a scalpel, cutting out disease. Sometimes you'll be a sword, and you'll take on threats with all the strength you can muster. And sometimes, Odette, you'll be a stiletto, a hidden weapon that slides quietly into the heart. ~ Daniel O'Malley

Props?" She was almost afraid to ask.
"Just the usual. Stethoscope, tongue depressor... scalpel, bone saw, rib spreaders… just the normal stuff."
"Maybe in future you should ditch the props, be less Nurse Ratched and more soft porn first day on the job candy striper."
Darcy look genuinely puzzled for a brief moment. "Where would the fun be in that for me? ~ Jane Cousins

Theater acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser ~ Michael Caine

One night, unable to sleep, I tiptoed into the hallway and overheard my grandfather telling a table of acquaintances about the expensive Armenian cognac with which he had once plied the surgeon who was going to remove my grandmother's gallbladder the next morning. They drank so much tat the surgeon was still drunk when he picked up the scalpel. The table roared, though my grandmother did not. ~ Boris Fishman

Unfortunately, I have dedicated great effort to the task of compiling this 'sensitive words glossary,' and I have mastered my filtering skills. I knew which words and sentences had to be cut, and I accepted the cutting as if that was the way it should be. In fact, I will often take it on myself to save time and cut a few words. I call this 'castrated writing' - - I am a proactive eunuch, I have already castrated myself before the surgeon raises his scalpel. ~ Murong Xuecun

You try to blunt certain emotions, but your tool isn't a scalpel, it's a sledgehammer. And you're blunting all of them. To protect yourself from feeling the horrible things, you prevent yourself from feeling some of the positive things. ~ Ariel Leve

When there is no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool. ~ Paul Kalanithi

I killed him." "Why did you slit his throat?" "I was drunk." "Why did you use a scalpel?" "What's a scalpel? ~ Andrius B. Tapinas

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living. ~ Nicolas Chamfort

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her. ~ Mary Roach

Ian whirled to attack Duncan. His father had yanked the silver scalpel out of his chest and he drove that scalpel right toward Duncan's heart. And the bastard was smiling as he did it. "Let's see you save someone now, hero." The scalpel sank into his flesh. Duncan glanced down at the weapon. "Isn't it supposed to burn?" Ian's face paled. ~ Cynthia Eden

I rather doubt he had the sense to see the truth: that there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions-guilty/innocent, criminal/victim-cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel. ~ William Landay

If you accept – and I do – that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don't say or like or want said. The Law is a huge blunt weapon that does not and will not make distinctions between what you find acceptable and what you don't. This is how the Law is made. People making art find out where the limits of free expression are by going beyond them and getting into trouble. [...] The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible. ~ Neil Gaiman

The voice was gentle, like a scalpel petting the short hairs of your throat. ~ Vernor Vinge

It was like a new kind of vision, seeing with eyes as keen as scalpel blades, that cut away desires and emotions and wishful thinking and left only what was fact. ~ Marcus Sedgwick

At first I was queasy; I'll never forget the sound of the scalpel cutting a body open. But it was so cool trying to work out how these people died. ~ Jonathan Davis

Words have power, which is why Imam Ali says, "Speak only when your words are more beautiful than the silence." After all, everything in existence sprouted from the vibration of the divinely uttered word "Be! And it is" (36:82). So remember, your tongue is like a knife; it can either kill like the sword of a samurai or save like the scalpel of a surgeon. ~ A. Helwa

DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.' ~ Gustave Flaubert

Why am I doing this? Why do I want to know the names and functions of all the beautiful structures I've spent my years violating? Because I don't deserve to keep them anonymous. I want the pain of knowing them, and by extension myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red hot and sterilized in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside me. ~ Isaac Marion

Entirely out of patience, Dr Caldwell reaches out her hand to pick up the scalpel again. But right then, something happens that makes her stop. Two things, really. The first is an explosion, loud enough to make the windows rattle in their frames. The second is an ear-splitting scream, like a hundred people shrieking all at the same time. Dr Selkirk's face looks first blank, then terrified. "That's general evacuation," she says. "Isn't it? Isn't that the evacuation siren?" Dr Caldwell doesn't waste time answering her. She crosses to the window and hauls up the blinds. Melanie ~ M.R. Carey