Amputation Quotes

“As he defended the book one evening in the early 1980s at the Carnegie Endowment in New York, I knew that some of what he said was true enough, just as some of it was arguably less so. (Edward incautiously dismissed 'speculations about the latest conspiracy to blow up buildings or sabotage commercial airliners' as the feverish product of 'highly exaggerated stereotypes.') Covering Islam took as its point of departure the Iranian revolution, which by then had been fully counter-revolutionized by the forces of the Ayatollah. Yes, it was true that the Western press—which was one half of the pun about 'covering'—had been naïve if not worse about the Pahlavi regime. Yes, it was true that few Middle East 'analysts' had had any concept of the latent power of Shi'ism to create mass mobilization. Yes, it was true that almost every stage of the Iranian drama had come as a complete surprise to the media. But wasn't it also the case that Iranian society was now disappearing into a void of retrogressive piety that had levied war against Iranian Kurdistan and used medieval weaponry such as stoning and amputation against its internal critics, or even against those like unveiled women whose very existence constituted an offense?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed.
Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.”
― Kristin Hannah, Home Front

“Pop's leg was across the room when I came downstairs.”
― Kathryn Miller Haines, The Girl Is Murder

“Some people only needed you for transactions. Don’t let sweet personalities fool you into thinking they’ll hold your hand if it’s got blood on it. If one day, you lost a leg, your boss wouldn’t close the store branch for you. If you lost a home, your old classmates wouldn’t lend you theirs. If you decided to give up, your circle will say you made the right decision. No one’s going to save you, but they love meeting you. And so suddenly, when you lose, the whole world turns on you. A freak— as if alienation was only one amputation, one home, one failure away.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Some people are happy that they have each lost one instead of both legs, whereas some are unhappy because they have each lost a toenail.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.

Before the great slaughter, Collin’d been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn’t retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.

And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn’t even tried out yet.

Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?

Collin. The poor guy didn’t even have time to sort out his thoughts.

In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.

He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren’t worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn’t equipped to deal with them.

Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots.

But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive.

From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe… Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet?

In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn’t. He was still alive, writhing on his hook.

They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing.

Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room.

And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next – thirty-eight in all – the docs finally got him “back on his feet”. But by then, the war was long over.”
― Jacques Tardi, Goddamn This War!

“Melvin Brands took bread, and the foot, wrapped in camphored cloth.”
― Julie Berry, All the Truth That's in Me

“The loss of one leg, arm, or eye, or its function, almost always blinds one to the fact that the very same thing could have happened to the other one too.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“As an amputated hand cannot be disowned because it is experiencing a futurity, of which the victim is its forebear, so Robin was an amputation that Nora could not renounce.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“Upon seeing the third and final table I realized that most of the people listed would most likely be dead, or come out of these qualifying races with severed limbs of as Revaarn liked to say 'Loose a limb no problem, it'll be amputated and replaced with a robotic one.”
― Charon Lloyd-Roberts, SCATHE

“This cat is missing a leg," he remarked to Beatrix.
"Yes, I would have named her Nelson, after the one-armed admiral, but she's female. She belonged to the cheesemaker until her foot was caught in a trap."
"Why did you name her Lucky?" Annandale asked.
"I hoped it would change her fortunes."
"And did it?"
"Well, she's sitting in the lap of an earl, isn't she?" Beatrix pointed out, and Annandale laughed outright.
He touched the cat's remaining paw. "She is fortunate to have been able to adapt."
"She was determined," Beatrix said. "You should have seen the poor thing, not long after the amputation. She kept trying to walk on the missing leg, or jump down from a chair, and she would stumble and lose her balance. But one day, she woke up and seemed to have accepted the fact that the leg was gone for good. And she became nearly as agile as before." She added significantly, "The trick was forgetting about what she had lost... and learning to go on with what she had left."
Annandale gave her a fascinated stare, his lips curving. "What a clever young woman you are.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Love in the Afternoon

“He had brought his bone saw in its leather case. And his white linen smock, the one he used to save his clothes when he had dirty work in store, and would have Li Chang wash and bleach after. An amputation would be the dirtiest work there was. He remembered the smocks the surgeons wore, layer on layer of red, dried blood darker under fresh red splashes, with the occasional white splinter of bone.

Joshua prayed as he rode, prayed hard and desperately, prayed that the smock in his bag would be clean and white when he turned homeward.”
― Karen A. Wyle, What Heals the Heart

“He staggered and might have toppled sideways if Clara had not been there, grabbing his arm and steadying him. He turned toward her and saw her read, and then reflect, the anguish in his face. Her grip on his arm went from support to a more frantic clutch. She said under her breath, “You can get through this.” And after a long, shaky breath: “I’ll get you through it.”

But her hand was trembling on his arm.”
― Karen A. Wyle, What Heals the Heart

“He kept eating, with a stubborn determination like something in a dream, until he heard the door open and close again. There was still some soup in the bowl. He set it on the floor for Major, let his head fall into his hands, and sobbed like a broken-hearted child. Or like a young man, barely more than a boy, waking up with only half a leg.”
― Karen A. Wyle, What Heals the Heart

“The unfamiliar body part--I was afraid to name it--was out in the open, his foot nowhere to be found. I was later told to call it a "stump," a word I would never feel comfortable saying. The empty space below his knee sucked the air out of my body until I was empty, too. And then I was running in the opposite direction. It was too permanent, too real. His foot was gone. It was just fucking gone.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir

“I imagined what cutting off a leg entailed, what it must have looked like lying beside the rest of his body. What does one do with a severed leg? I wondered.”
― Karie Fugett, Alive Day: A Memoir