And If the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.

Surgery is the red flower that blooms among the leaves and thorns that are the rest of medicine.

You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.

The surgeon knows all the parts of the brain but he does not know his patient's dreams.

You do not die all at once. Some tissues live on for minutes, even hours, giving still their little cellular shrieks, molecular echoes of the agony of the whole corpus.

Each is like a river that leaves behind its name and shape, the whole course of its path , to vanish into the vast sea of God.

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

Thus is the fruit of the Earth taken, its flesh torn. Thus is it given over standing, toward rot. It is the principle of corruption, the death of what is, the birth of what is to be. You are wine.

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

The heart is pure theater throbbing in its cage palpably as any nightingale.

I contemplate the body, dead and diseased as well as alive and healthy.

I closed my eyes and dived into foreign water.

you are a volume in the divine booka mirror to the power that created the universewhatever you want, ask it of yourselfwhatever you're looking for can only be foundinside of you

Everybody can see that my swing is homegrown. That means everybody has a chance to do it.

Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.

My dad used to play drums in a country band, and my mom is an incredible singer.

I won't ever direct a film. And I certainly won't write an autobiography. Only self-obsessed people want to write or talk about themselves!

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.

That first concept is alway the most naturally and best. The mind errs, the emotion never.

Apples taste sweetest when they're going.

Other conditions being equal, if one force is hurled against another ten times its size, the result will be the flight of the former.