Dissect Quotes & Sayings

Yet there are some people - Steve Allen would dissect comedy forever; he's a really funny guy, but he would love talking about comedy. I'm doing it right now and you all seem bored. — Bob Saget

When you're in the spotlight, people want to dissect you and then put you back together the way they want you. — Tracy Morgan

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books. — Douglas Lain

In order to discover truth it is necessary to coldly dissect and examine all of our prejudices and inherent biases to ensure we receive unbiased answers. This takes effort. It is always easier to simply accept the ideas presented to us than to question the status quo. — Stephen McAndrew

Having been pondering while slowly walking along, he now stopped as these thoughts caught hold of him, and right away another thought sprang forth from these, a new thought, which was: That I know nothing about myself, that Siddhartha has remained thus alien and unknown to me, stems from one cause, a single cause: I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself! I searched Atman, I searched Brahman, I was willing to to dissect my self and peel off all of its layers, to find the core of all peels in its unknown interior, the Atman, life, the divine part, the ultimate part. But I have lost myself in the process. — Hermann Hesse

Introduction I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn't one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a way to learn about human anatomy. Our textbooks had almost nothing on aging or frailty or dying. How the process unfolds, how people experience the end of their lives, and how it affects those around them seemed beside the point. The way we saw it, and the way our professors saw it, the purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise. The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy's classic novella. — Atul Gawande

The school was very supportive. The only class that I had to attend every day was biology when we were doing dissections. I would take an 8 a.m. bio class, dissect my animal, and then run to work. — Mila Kunis

I sit for a few moments in the empty courtroom. If this were like old times, I would got home and tell Delia that I'd lost the hearing. I'd repeat verbatim what the judge had said, and I'd ask her to interpret it. We'd dissect my performance until she finally threw up her hands and said we were going nowhere with any of this.
She will not be back tonight, I suppose. And we're still going nowhere. — Jodi Picoult

Our Arab mothers and sisters are suffering from injustices like domestic violence, sexual harassment, child marriages and honour killings, some are still fighting for their right to drive or travel without male custody therefore our powerful Arab media was not only expected to broadcast this particular one of a kind Women's march it should have held panels to dissect the issues being brought forth in order for the Arab world to better understand that gender equality is not an idea that one believes in, it is a planned movement that requires an enormous effort on the part of both men and women to reach. — Aysha Taryam

It's a poem, for crying out loud! The beauty of poetry is that it can mean different things to different people at different times. But you know they're expecting one specific, so-called correct answer, and any other thoughtful response will be counted off. It's wrong to dissect poetry like this! — Wendy Higgins

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones. — Kay Redfield Jamison

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension ... — T. S. Eliot

Hodgkin had just returned from his second visit to Paris, where he had learned to prepare and dissect cadaveric specimens. He was promptly recruited to collect specimens for Guy's new museum. The job's most inventive academic perk, perhaps, was his new title: the Curator of the Museum and the Inspector of the Dead. Hodgkin — Siddhartha Mukherjee

In those days before hearing Charlie Parker and Dizzy, and before learning of the so-called bebop era
by the way, I have some thoughts about that word, "bebop"
my first jazz hero ever, jazz improvisor hero, was Lester Young. I was a big "Lester Young-oholic," and all of my buddies were Lester Young-oholics. We'd get together and dissect, analyze, discuss, and listen to Lester Young's solos for hours and hours and hours. He was our god. — J.J. Johnson

If we analyze or dissect a flower, looking for the flower among its parts, we shall not find it ... And yet, we cannot deny the existence of flowers and of their sweet scent. — Dalai Lama XIV

Just as Leonardo da Vinci studied human anatomy and dissected corpses, so I try to dissect souls. — Edvard Munch

I thoroughly believe in crying, yelling, pulling my hair out, and experiencing heartache, BUT once I'm done I dissect the pain and learn lessons from it. — Lilly Singh

Instead of dissecting Scripture, we need to let Scripture dissect us our thoughts and attitudes, our dreams and desires, our fears and hopes. — Mark Batterson

You can't dissect love, you can't explain it, because once you do you prevent yourself from being able to experience it. You pull yourself out of the enjoyment of it, the excitement of it, the meaning, no ... the importance of it. — Eric Luper

Fat Kid Proverb #52: Never miss an opportunity to dissect a compliment. — K.L. Going

Was I a science experiment? Did he want to pin me down and dissect me? — Suzanne Young

I watch so much television. My DVR is full. I love putting my kids to bed, so I can sit on the couch with my wife and we can dissect The Affair, The Americans, House of Cards, or whatever it is. I'm so lucky. — Scott Foley

I come from a theater background, so I always like to dissect the scene and try to get some hint about what the author was trying to get at. I still look up the meaning of the name of the character to see if there are any clues in that. — Adina Porter

On the train on the way home, as I dissect all the ways that today went wrong, I'm surprised by the fact that I don't feel as awful as I might. Thinking about it, I know why that is: I didn't have a drink last night, and I have no desire to have one now. I am interested, for the first time in ages, in something other than my own misery. I have purpose. Or at least, I have a distraction. — Paula Hawkins

There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea
that idea which the church has never ceased to embody
I AM! — Henry Adams

American culture has always known success, not suffering, so we've never known what to do with this part of the Bible. The more we succeed, the more we're seduced into thinking we can control everything. We dissect Revelation to get a sense of control over the future. — Bill Vaughan

They would break his body. Crush his will. Dissect his mind down to the last synapse.
The undoing of Evan Walker had begun — Rick Yancey

Listen, if you don't talk big game, you never get anywhere. If you don't think big, you don't get big. Some people call it egotistical, some people call it high hopes, some people call it confidence. It's all in how you want to dissect it. — Vanilla Ice

Grandma once told me it's easy to overthink love, to dissect it and question it until it is no more. — Ellen Hopkins

I don't want to go to the government," the Schwa says.
"Yeah," I said. "They'd dissect him and put him in a formaldehyde fish tank in Area 51."
Howie shook his head. "Area 51 is for aliens," he says. "They'd probably put him in Area 52. — Neal Shusterman

What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements. — Anais Nin

I can fall in love in a simple way, but I can dissect it in such an intense fashion when it ends. — Ellie Goulding

Books are living things with blood and bones, and it breaks our heart when people dissect them. — Rebecca Wells

I love commercial music! I can dissect it and criticize it with any critic in the business. But without any thought, I just enjoy it. It's folk music. That's what I'm doing, folk music. I'm not intellectualizing it ... and making it into a phoney art form. I'm just doing the music I enjoy. — John Lennon

There are a lot of actors who don't like reality stars 'cause they feel these people aren't accomplished. They haven't done this or that, but they are savvy. They have found a way to make it work. I could dissect your career all day long, but I'm focused on my own career. — Niecy Nash

To construct mechanically the brain of a somniferous tale, it is not enough to dissect nonsense & mightily stupefy the reader's intelligence with renowned doses, so as to paralyze his faculties for the rest of his life by the infallible law of fatigue; one must, besides, with good mesmeric fluid, make it somnambulistically impossible for him to move, against his nature forcing his eyes to cloud over at your own fixed stare. — Comte De Lautreamont

For this, Love is enraged with me;
Yet kills not. If I must example be
To future rebels, if the unborn
Must learn by my being cut up and torn,
Kill and dissect me, Love; for this
Torture against thine own end is:
Racked carcasses make ill anatomies — John Donne

Flaubert teaches you to gave upon the truth and not blink from its consequences; he teaches you, with Montaigne, to sleep on the pillow of doubt; he teaches you to dissect out the constituent parts of reality, and to observe the Nature is always a mixture of genres; he teaches you the most exact use of language; he teaches you not to approach a book in search of moral or social pills
literature is not a pharmacopoeia; he teaches the pre-eminence of Truth, Beauty, Feeling and Style. And if you study his private life, he teaches courage, stoicism, friendship; the importance of intelligence, skepticism and wit; the folly of cheap patriotism; the virtue of being able to remain by yourself in your own room; the hatred of hypocrisy; distrust of the doctrinaire; the need for plain speaking. — Julian Barnes

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I am sentimental,' she said. 'I could dissect a koala but not its baby. I like the words damozel, eglantine, elegant. I love when you kiss my elongated white hand. — Vladimir Nabokov

Frequently we do not leave the past behind. We clasp on to it. We dissect it, and let fears for the future, tempered by the past, unconsciously prevent us from taking up the task eternal. — Ray Simpson

The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they're wrong... Until they come face to face with someone who is tenacious enough to dissect their logic, and resilient enough to endure the thinly veiled intellectual abuse they dish out during debate, they're never forced to question their ability to defend bad ideas. — Scott Berkun

No matter what you write, no matter how meticulous and painstaking the creation process, someone is going to laugh, scorn, and dissect your work with criticism while another quietly falls in love with it. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn't be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them - but there's no way I was touching those bugs. — Meg Rosoff

All of that will be gone by morning. Instead, they will dissect this last evening for years to come. What had they missed that they should have seen? What small gesture, forgotten, might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones, wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure. — Celeste Ng

Humor is like a frog; if you dissect it, it dies. — Mark Twain

I don't know why I go to school unless for kicks, oh well might as well do dissect a frog. — S.E. Hinton

We murder to dissect. — William Wordsworth

First you inspect me Then you dissect me Then you reject me I wait for the day That you'll resurrect me Animate — Gayle Forman

In order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. — Friedrich Schiller

If you actually dissect the lyrics in 'Motley Crue', you'll notice that there's a lot going on beneath the surface. — Nikki Sixx

I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.
Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath. — Marisa De Los Santos

So much of the writing is not conscious, in the sense that it's not calculated. I remember in film school we had so many studies with big fancy words where you could dissect a movie and make charts of all of the characters' complicated inner relations and themes and what does this mean? And it's overwhelming as a student. It's great for a student, but as a writer, it's paralyzing. — Don Hertzfeldt

God, why do I give interviews to 'the Guardian'? They always try to dissect you, and I don't really think about stuff in the way that you're asking me these questions. — Jamie Oliver

Amy will be fine. Amy ... " Here was where I should have said, "Amy loves Mom." But I couldn't tell Go that Amy loved our mother, because after all that time, Amy still barely knew our mother. Their few meetings had left them both baffled. Amy would dissect the conversations for days after - "And what did she mean by ... " - as if my mother were some ancient peasant tribeswoman arriving from the tundra with an armful of raw yak meat and some buttons for bartering, trying to get something from Amy that wasn't on offer. — Gillian Flynn

My first summer in college I worked in a fruit fly lab where I had two jobs: dissect the fruit fly larvae brains and incinerate the old tubes of flies. — Emily Oster

I often forget that other people's stories aren't simply introductions to my own more engaging, more dramatic, more relevant, and better-told tales, but rather ends in themselves, tales I can learn from or repeat or dissect or savor. — Will Schwalbe

In the hard life of politics it is well known that no platform nor any program advanced by either major American party has any purpose beyond expressing emotion. Platforms are a ritual with a history of their own and, after being written, they are useful chiefly to scholars who dissect them as archeological political remains. The writing of a platform does indeed flatter many people, gives many pressure groups a chance to blow off steam in public, permits the leaders of such pressure groups to report back to their memberships of their valiant efforts to persuade. But in actual fact, all platforms are meaningless: the program of either party is what lies in the vision and conscience of the candidate the party chooses to lead it. Nevertheless, — Theodore H. White

As the country continues to dissect the recent natural disaster, we might want to start considering what about the disaster wasn't actually 'natural' at all ... Human activity, the burning of fossil fuels, is causing global warming. Global warming is causing the oceans to warm. Warm oceans are steroids for storms. — Michael Moore

A lot of the comedians don't even tell the joke. Like only three tell the joke, the rest of them dissect it. — Bob Saget

As soon as you start to think of that thing that you want to convey or say, you can always just say it much better than you can actually rhyme it or stuff it into a song. It's very, very difficult to just kind of get your point across without going the back way. And you have to be good at that, to not think about things so hard. Let the pen take over, so that it's somebody else's job to dissect the lyrics and tell you what you're all about. — Ariel Pink

The sensible part of me wanted to dissect my emotions, overthinking and overcomplicating my reaction to Jev. — Becca Fitzpatrick

The poet has an obligation to dissect his own corpse and reveal the symptoms of its illness to the world. — Soseki Natsume

We must learn to see the full picture, and not just the treats before our eyes. Our trendy gadgets, such as smartphones and tablets, have given us new access to the world. We regularly communicate with people we would never even have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything at any time. But we have learned how much our gadgets and out idealistically motivated digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultrapowerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect. — Jaron Lanier

Eternity.-Thy name Or glad, or fearful, we pronounce, as thoughts Wandering in darkness shape thee. Thou strange being, Which art and must be, yet which contradict'st All sense, all reasoning,-thou, who never wast Less than thyself, and who still art thyself Entire, though the deep draught which Time has taken Equals thy present store-No line can reach To thy unfathomed depths. The reasoning sage Who can dissect a sunbeam, count the stars, And measure distant worlds, is here a child, And, humbled, drops his calculating pen. — Anna Letitia Barbauld

Every life has a beginning, a middle, and an end; dissect history and you'll see the word that defines it as a tale, a narrative. — Jodi Picoult

Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. — Herman Melville

Man is only man at the surface. Remove the skin, dissect, and immediately you come to machinery. — Paul Valery

This is the greatest damn thing about the universe. That we can know so much, recognize so much, dissect, do everything, and we can't grasp it. — Henry Miller

If you go to the octopus, and if you're not too squeamish, dissect it. You'll find that it has a camera eye which is remarkable similar to our own. And yet we know that the octopus belongs to an invertebrate group called cephalopod mulluses, evolutionarily very distant indeed from the chordates to which we belong. — Simon Conway Morris

If you really dissect hip-hop you will find a whole lot of Charles Mingus, Ron Carter, Ahmad Jamal, a lot of classic jazz samples in there. — Robert Glasper

Trying to make sense of love is like trying to dissect a rainbow. — Suzanne Selfors

How could I suddenly go from a person who had struggled to dissect an already dead mouse, to someone who was willing to murder a human being? There was no logic to it! — Adele Rose

You can dissect a joke just as you can a frog. But it tends to die on you. — E.B. White

I don't know if it's something that we as a species are hardwired for or if it's more of a contemporary phenomenon related to technology and rapid dissemination of data. I did know that whatever its cause or nature, I wanted to interrogate this phenomenon. But the only way for me to do that, the only tool I have to dissect it with, is a fictional narrative. — Ron Currie Jr.

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them. — Samuel Butler

I guess I've played a lot of failures, which is a Huston quality, I guess. I love losers, though, and have never met anyone who hasn't been one sometime. I'm always looking to understand them, and my father had an extremely keen eye to be able to dissect and bring that forward in the way he told his stories. — Danny Huston

If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song. — Sylvia Plath

My dearest friend, Myron Bolitar, though "friend" seems an inadequate word to describe our relationship, worries about this aspect of my personality. He feels there is something "missing" inside of me. He traces it back to what my own mother did to my father. But does the origin matter? This is what I am. I am quite content this way. He claims that I don't get it. He is wrong. I do understand the need for companionship. My favorite times are when he and I sit around together and simply discuss life or watch television or dissect a sporting event - and then, when we are done, I go to bed with a gorgeous body and, uh, gorge. Does — Harlan Coben

There are actually two separate issues here. The first is whether (as ancient philosophers and Nietzsche assume) only the privileged elite can live a worthwhile life. The second is whether it's possible to fulfill the roles of both serious artist and upstanding citizen. It seems to me that philosophy can dissect both questions, by delineating clearly the anatomy of the good life and the structural conditions of the roles. — Philip Kitcher

There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins ... Answer me, Machinist, has Nature really arranged all the springs of feeling in this animal to the end that he might not feel? Has he nerves that he may be incapable of suffering? — Voltaire

If Jesus is Lord then the only right response to him is surrender and obedience. He is Savior and he is Lord. We cannot separate his demands from his love. We cannot dissect Jesus and relate only to the parts that we like or need. Christ died so that we could be forgiven for managing our own lives. It would be impossible to thank Christ for dying and yet to continue running our own lives. — Rebecca Pippert

How is it that men create such lovely silhouettes, such shadows of the corporeal, capturing things in their most wraith-like moment and yet they are not content with honing such divine talent? Instead, they opt to dissect the cadaver of that which cast the shadow. — F. Voutsakis

You cannot analyze a kiss any more than you can dissect the fragrance of flowers. — Josh Billings

Whatever sense of professional competence we feel in adult life is less the sum of accomplishment than the absence of impossibility: it's really our relief at no longer having to do things we were never good at doing in the first place - relief at never again having to dissect a frog or memorize the periodic table. — Adam Gopnik

As a white male in America, I have privilege. As a white male who happens to be an artist with a fan base, I have a platform to spread awareness about that privilege. However, songs about race and privilege are very difficult to A) write and B) dissect as a listener. They're heavy. — Macklemore

Style, is like a frog: you can dissect the thing, but it somehow dies in the process. — Arthur Quinn

Comedians dissect jokes all the time. Comedians are beautiful structuralists. But ultimately it's an athletic endeavor. — Stephen Colbert

That's all true, but there was something else going on for me as a kid, something about my gender identity that I haven't figured out yet. And that's one of the things I'm hoping to dissect and investigate in this memoir project. — Alison Bechdel

And I'm sort of deconstructing the process of what marks came first, what came later. Every aspect of the image is interesting to me to dissect and understand. — Robert Longo

I do not want to kill and dissect myself any longer, — Hermann Hesse

It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing. — Questlove

Even though I loved to write, I never liked English lit. class very much. I think it ruins books when you dissect them too much. I liked my art classes best. — Meg Cabot

Next time you're about to rule out some guy because he's not your ideal, try to focus on the good things about him, because some guy is going to have to focus on the good things about you, even though he may have wanted someone more easygoing or taller. Every time you start to dissect some guy, note that he's willfully ignoring all of this in order to go out with you. — Lori Gottlieb

This is all very fine, but it won't do-Anatomy-botany-Nonsense! Sir, I know an old woman in Covent Garden, who understands botany better, and as for anatomy, my butcher can dissect a joint full as well; no, young man, all that is stuff; you must go to the bedside, it is there alone you can learn disease!
Comment to Hans Sloane on Robert Boyle's letter of introduction describing Sloane as a 'ripe scholar, a good botanist, a skilful anatomist'. — Thomas Sydenham

My challenge when I came back was to face the young talent, dissect their games, and show them maybe that they needed to learn more about the game than just the money aspect. — Michael Jordan

But have you ever overheard two women discussing men? Men are crude liars, comparing their drabs, but women - I'd rather have [an] anatomist dissect me alive than to listen to the things the ladies say about us when they think they are alone. — Lois McMaster Bujold

You cannot understand what makes things live when you must first rob their life. And so when man learned to categorize, number and dissect nature, he lost its living quality and no longer felt a part of it. — Jane Roberts

Leave me in peace to converse with my friends? Whom I promise not to kill and dissect. — Terry Pratchett

Since my logic aims to teach and instruct the understanding, not that it may with the slender tendrils of the mind snatch at and lay hold of abstract notions (as the common logic does), but that it may in very truth dissect nature, and discover the virtues and actions of bodies, with their laws as determined in matter; so that this science flows not merely from the nature of the mind, but also from the nature of things. — Francis Bacon