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.

Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth.

A minor operation is one that is done on someone else

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

Cutting for Stone is nothing short of masterful -a riveting tale of love, medicine, and the complex dynamic of twin brothers. It is beautifully conceived and written. The settings are wonderfully pictorial. There is no doubt in my mind that Cutting for Stone will endure in the permanent literature of our time.

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