Quotes About Amputation

“Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.”

— Gail Caldwell

“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

“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

“Calf love doesn't usually survive amputation, Your Majesty.”

— Megan Whalen Turner

“There is no "universal moral urge" and not all ethical systems agree. Polygamy, human sacrifice, infanticide, cannibalism (Eucharist), wife beating, self-mutilation, foot binding, preemptive war, torture of prisoners, circumcision, female genital mutilation, racism, sexism, punitive amputation, castration and incest are perfectly "moral" in certain cultures. Is god confused?”

— Dan Barker

“I stood there, my head bowed, my shoulders hunched. This is how it feels to be dragged from the cement shoes of a comfortable rut. The slow, steady strain on my legs became an excruciating amputation. My ankles pulled free from my feet. Bones snapped, cartilage tore, veins pulsed blood onto the soft brown clay of the yard.”

— Deborah Smith

“It's like putting a band-aid on an amputation!”

— Natasha Anders

“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

“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

“To seek absolution from humanity would be to seek my own folly. One may speak of forgiveness here, and another may actually mean it there, but legions remain who would condemn a starving man to amputation for pinching a crust of bread. We are petty creatures who seek to aggrandize ourselves by feasting on the dignity of our fellows.”

— Kevin Hearne

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

— Trudi Canavan

“Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.”

— David Mitchell

“For most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory
no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto
and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.”

— Diane Ackerman

“I missed you." A humorless laugh closed his eyes. When he opened them, the redness had turned them deep mossy green.
"Sorry." Trip's own eyes welled up.
"Not like, gosh-I-wonder-what-Trip-is-doing missed you. I meant I actually started to feel like I'd survived some horrible amputation and part of me had been hacked off and lost in a haunted warzone being gnawed by the walking dead. I missed you because you were missing. I actually spent weeks trying to imagine what you were doing at any given Moment ... obsessing, really." He didn't wipe his wet cheeks. "Trip must be seeing the new Superman this weekend. I wonder if Trip's asleep. I wish I could swallow Trip's load right this second. Trip needs to stop and eat now, something not dyed or in plastic. I even went to watch the Big Dog office doors a couple of times, like the Little Match Queer, when I knew you had pages due, just to make sure, you were okay, but then you ... I dunno: vanished.”

— Damon Suede

“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”

— C.S. Lewis

“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

“I see marriage as an operation that sews two people together, and divorce is a kind of amputation that can take a long time to heal. The longer you were married, or the rougher the amputation, the harder it is to recover.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

“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

“A divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you.”

— Margaret Atwood

“Jo claimed that the reason people survived breakups was that within days of the amputation, Mother Nature started reminding you of what you had been doing without, what could have been better, all the samll discontents you had been filing away.”

— Emma Donoghue

“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

“Kumar and I ended up stuffing tissue paper up our nostrils, but agreed that if we had to come down again more drastic action would be justified - like amputation.”

— Ben Aaronovitch

“I cannot belong to a nation which permits such barbarities as stoning to death and amputation - I don't care what religion it is.”

— Wole Soyinka

“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

“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

“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

“My father had osteomyelitis-his left arm was withered between his elbow and his shoulder ... But the amputation of a Stone Age man called Leaf, a stoneworker, does not relate to my father at all ...”

— Jim Crace

“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

“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 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

“The night before my amputation, my former basketball coach brought me a magazine with an article on an amputee who ran in the New York Marathon. It was then I decided to meet this new challenge head on and not only overcome my disability, but conquer it in such a way that I could never look back and say it disabled me.”

— Terry Fox

“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

“The code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylon prescribed this
punishment for a doctor convicted of inept surgery: amputation
of the hands.”

— L. M. Boyd

“Woe to those who get what they desire. Fulfillment leaves an empty space where your old self used to be, the self that pines and broods and reflects. You furnish a dream house in your imagination, but how startling and final when that dream house is your own address. What is left to you? Surrounded by what you wanted, you feel a sense of amputation. The feelings you were used to abiding with are useless. The conditions you established for your happiness are met. That youthful light-headed feeling whose sharp side is much like hunger is of no more use to you.”

— Laurie Colwin

“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

“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

“The only way to cure an egotist from bragging is by surgery
amputation at the neck.”

— Evan Esar

“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

“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