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.

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

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

The liver, that great maroon snail: No wave of emotion sweeps it. Neither music nor mathematics gives it pause in its appointed tasks.

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

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.

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else