Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

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

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.

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.

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.

Inside a home you left me, a blue orphanage. Inside a bluish mosaic, space to live.

May God give comfort to the suffering souls.

For that man is detested by me as the gates of hell whose outward words conceal his inmost thoughts.

Those who join the Carmelite Order are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone.

The important question is, how many hands have I shaked?

Watching those guys pummel each other so no one would suspect them of being weak was too much for me. Their reputations were more important than their faces.

To know how to wait. It is the great secret of success.

I want all the interested parties to come together and develop a solution that provides additional water and helps the lower Arkansas River communities thrive again.

Solve all your problems through meditation.

If I don't have an outlet in which to express myself...throug h songwriting or other mediums...I get a bit jittery.