Livers Quotes & Sayings

Come indoors then, and open the books on your library shelves. For you have a library and a good one. A working library, a living library; a library where nothing is chained down and nothing is locked up; a library where the songs of the singers rise naturally from the lives of the livers. — Virginia Woolf

Ryan, I require something so horrifically alcoholic that it makes livers tremble with fear and run for their lives when its name is uttered," I said solemnly. — Seanan McGuire

We don't have enough solid organs for transplantation; not enough kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. When you get a liver and you have three people who need it, who should get it? We tried to come up with an ethically defensible answer. Because we have to choose. — Ezekiel Emanuel

Do you know why more people don't sober up? Because they don't wear their livers on the outside. If everyone wore their liver on their forehead, say, it would be on full view and people would say, 'Heffens, Jock, that liver of yours is looking fair hobnailed,' and they would get shamed into doing something about it. — M.C. Beaton

It is astounding to me, and achingly sad, that with eighty thousand people on the waiting list for donated hearts and livers and kidneys, with sixteen a day dying there on that list, that more then half of the people in the position H's family was in will say no, will choose to burn those organs or let them rot. We abide the surgeon's scalpel to save our own lives, out loved ones' lives, but not to save a stranger's life. H has no heart, but heartless is the last thing you'd call her. — Mary Roach

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies ? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here : lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps : damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus!* And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure. — James Joyce

How many cowards whose hearts are all as false As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars, Who inward searched, have livers white as milk! — William Shakespeare

Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase 'organ failure' will disappear. — Michio Kaku

So I might have to marry Alec when I'm grown," Illia was prattling across to Seregil. "I hope that won't hurt your feelings too much."
Seregil slapped a hand over his heart like a troubadour in a mural. "Ah, fair maiden, I shall slay a thousand evil dragons for you, and lay their steaming black livers at your dainty feet, if only you will restore me to your favor."
"Livers!" Illia buried her face against Alec's shoulder with an outraged giggle.
"You wouldn't bring me livers, would you, Alec?"
"Of course not," Alec scoffed. "What a disgusting present. I'd bring you the eyeballs for a necklace, and all their scaly pointed tongues to tie your braids with. — Lynn Flewelling

That was what he wanted to tell his audience at Cambridge. He divided classical satirists into two classes - fierce men starving in garrets, and renouncing popularity and circulation to dwell in tubs, and calm good-livers "who tell amusingly the kind of truth that no one has ever denied." But for the present century the right spirit, he believed, was self-satire, the ability to see humor in the constant small defeats of life, and "the power to be startled by nothing, however extravagant." The subject, in the end, turned out to be more relevant than it had seemed, as anyone could have told who had heard Eddie and Wilfred laughing together. — Penelope Fitzgerald

Organ donation is the stuff of which dreams are made," he began. "Literally. In a given year, there may be 4,000 people waiting for 2,000 donated hearts, and 4,000 people waiting for 1,000 donated lungs. Livers? Probably 18,000 people will wait, 6,000 will get, and another 2,000 will die waiting. And the numbers are even higher when we talk about kidneys - 60,000 people waiting, 15,000 getting, 4,000 dying while they wait. By the way, the survival rate for these transplants is impressive, often up in the 85 percent range. — Barbara Delinsky

So, Mulder,' Colton spoke in a mocking tone. 'What do you think? Look like the work of Little Green Men?'
'Gray,' Mulder said seriously.
'What?' Colton asked.
'Gray,' Mulder explained. You said green men. A Reticulan's skin tone is gray. They're known for their extraction of human livers due to a lack of iron in the Reticulian Galaxy.'
Colton looked confused- as though he couldn't tell whether Mulder was joking. 'You can't be serious,' he said.
'Do you know how much liver and onions go for on Reticulum?' Mulder asked Colton. — Ellen Steiber

It was dog food. Beef livers with onions in a can. You open it up and it looks like vomit. — Tom Sizemore

She was able to draw no conclusions because her husband's patients, except for mutual friends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by their faces but by their pains, not by the colour of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by the size of their livers, the coating on their tongues, the blood in their urine, the hallucinations of their feverish nights. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?' he asked me suddenly. 'When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?'
I shook my head. 'No, but I've watched. I know what you mean.' The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.
The seat of human emotion should be the liver,' Doc Homer said. 'That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers.'
I understood exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left. — Barbara Kingsolver

I will hold your hand and travel with you for all our livers. — Charles Williamson

And for this imperfect immortality, what prices have been paid? How many livers, lungs, and veins? Shredded, polluted, shot? How many children deserted, family secrets betrayed, sordid trysts laid out for strangers to see? How many wives and husbands shoved to the side? How many ovens scorched with our hair? Gun barrels slid between our lips? Bathtubs slowly reddened by our blood and twisting drowned that drowned us? How many flawed pages burned in disgust and reduced to ashes? How many flawless moments observed from just a slight distance so that, later, we might reduce them to words? All with an unspoken prayer that these hard-won truths might outlast the brief years of our lives. — Kristopher Jansma

Souls are punished when they have gone forth from the body, some wandering among us, some going to hot or cold places of the earth, some harassed by spirits. Under all circumstances they suffer with the irrational part of their nature, with which they also sinned. For its sake there subsists that shadowy body which is seen about graves, especially the graves of evil livers. — Sallust

He always thought of the sea as 'la mar' which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as 'el mar' which is masculine.They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favours, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought. — Ernest Hemingway,

You were apt to go from one extreme to the other, in a truly pious environment; which is why ministers' sons in that day were more less expected to become loose livers when they grew up. — Bruce Catton

Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people. — Sherman Alexie

End-stage liver disease refers to a liver that's failing, and a very high percentage of those livers are what we call cirrhotic, or the patient's liver has become cirrhotic, and what cirrhosis is, is the scarring of the liver tissue. — John Roberts

Verily, I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, and wear a golden sorrow. — William Shakespeare

Without heads, where might they keep their minds, if they have them?" Kebes put in. "In their livers, obviously," Sokrates said. — Jo Walton

T is better to be lowly born, And range with humble livers in content, Than to be perked up in a glistering grief, And wear a golden sorrow. King Henry VIII. II.3 — William Shakespeare

Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, & objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh & bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself. — Leonora Carrington

My heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers and things, and a hard piece of corn-crust started down my throat after it and got met on the road with a cough and was shot across the table and took one of the children in the eye and curled him up like a fishing-worm, and let a cry out of him the size of a war-whoop, and Tom he turned kinder blue around the gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of things for about a quarter of a minute or as much as that, and I would a sold out for half price if there was a bidder. — Mark Twain

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras. — Herman Melville

Though it's still not right. I have other best friends, and this is different. Besides, Mike is my absolute best friend."
"Yeah, I was going to say ... " Mike nodded ...
"That's right, honey. Felix, you're ... something different."
"Amen," Mike said.
"You're not like a good neighbor or a companion for Saturday shopping, and certainly not like my husband. But you are something more than what the word 'friend' can contain. Mike has my heart, completely, eternally, no second thoughts." She grabbed Mike's hand. "But you have my ... say, my liver."
Felix frowned, pondering that. "Livers are good. Positively essential, from what I remember of biology. And good eating, if the need arises. Very well. I will be your liver ... — Shannon Hale

There are sufficient and suitable accommodations for all the different sorts of persons that are in the world: for great and small, for high and low, rich and poor, wise and unwise, bond and free, persons of all nations and all conditions and circumstances, for those that have been great sinners as well as for moral livers; for weak saints and those that are babes in Christ as well as for those that are stronger and more grown in grace. — Jonathan Edwards

We try not to waste food in general. Because as a meat eater it's just responsible to eat as much of the animal as you can. It's also instilled in my family culture, where it's not even an ethical thing, it's just that all those parts are delicious, too. You eat the ears, you eat the intestines, you eat the livers, the hearts. — Thu Tran

Overmedication: We're killing ourselves. Degrading
often unseen & often unfelt
our kidneys, livers, vital organs. Until it's too late. And we croak. Kidney failure, heart failure, liver failure. We do it to ourselves — David R. Wommack

It's not just that," Chief Porter said. "A guy who once would have raped and killed a woman, now a lot of times he also has to cut off her lips and mail them to us or take her eyes for a souvenir and keep them in his freezer at home. There's more flamboyant craziness these days." Giving the buttered cinnamon roll a reprieve, Ozzie said, "Maybe it's all these superhero movies with all their supervillains. Some psychopath who used to be satisfied raping and murdering, these days he thinks that he should be in a Batman movie, he wants to be the Joker or the Penguin." "No real-life bad guy wants to be the Penguin," I assured him. "Norman Bates was happy just dressing up like his mother and stabbing people," Chief Porter said, "but Hannibal Lecter has to cut off their faces and eat their livers with fava beans. The role models have become more intense. — Dean Koontz

Charlie slowly crumpled to the floor, Allison soon joining him. "Dinner is served!" Stanley trumpeted, as he reached into the steaming mass of offal and fished around for the teens' livers. "Aha!" he crowed, as he lifted one liver in each hand over his head.
Stanley brought his right hand down and took a large bite from the first liver, spreading blood and gore over his face. He chewed for a moment and swallowed, and then bit off a large hunk of the other one. "All I need are some fava beans and a nice Chianti!" he said as he slurped. — Abramelin Keldor

This article is going to be very egotistical and MacLanesque and maybe somewhat shocking besides, so I strongly advise divers citizens of Butte not to read it. It occurs to me that some of the things I write do not agree with the constitutions of the said citizens - it seems to be bad for their livers - hence this preliminary note of warning. So now if you go right on and read it and it affects your liver unpleasantly, don't blame me. — Mary MacLane

The only thing I envy in young people is their livers. — Brendan Behan

Flamingo necks, peacock brains, pike livers, lark tongues, sow's udders, elephant trunks and ears extravagantly frilled with parsley. — Kate Quinn

I require something so horrifically alcoholic that it makes livers tremble with fear and run for their lives when its name is uttered. — Seanan McGuire

We're workers, they say. Work, they call it! That's the crummiest part of the whole business. We're down in the hold, heaving and panting, stinking and sweating our balls off, and meanwhile! Up on deck in the fresh air, what do you see?! Our masters having a fine time with beautiful pink and perfumed women on their laps. They send for us, we're brought up on deck. They put on their top hats and give us a big spiel like as follows: "You no-good swine! We're at war! Those stinkers in Country No. 2! We're going to board them and cut their livers out! Let's go! Let's go! We've got everything we need on board! All together now! Let's hear you shout so the deck trembles: 'Long live Country No. 1!' So you'll be heard for miles around. The man that shouts the loudest will get a medal and a lollipop! Let's — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do, with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our livers eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough. — Pat Conroy

To produce foie gras, ducks and geese are force-fed enormous amounts of grain and fat, which causes their livers to swell to many times the normal size. — Kate Winslet

The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a spice-laden haze, then chicken livers, hard boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken and truffles in masses of piping hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Our ancestors, when about to build a town or an army post, sacrificed some of the cattle that were wont to feed on the site proposed and examined their livers. If the livers of the first victims were dark-coloured or abnormal, they sacrificed others, to see whether the fault was due to disease or their food. They never began to build defensive works in a place until after they had made many such trials and satisfied themselves that good water and food had made the liver sound and firm ... healthfulness being their chief object. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

He can hit a man in the liver so the blood flow stops. It takes a full second before the pain registers and the man falls. I've seen Billy hook men's livers and punch at their hearts. I've seen him break a man's nose in the ring, shatter an eardrum, close an eye. I've seen him hit a man so hard, fist to jaw, the man seemed to fall asleep before he fell, his body so relaxed his face looked calm even when his head slammed against canvas. — Adam Berlin

It smells like... I think it's bile. Tooms must have taken it from his victims' livers.'
'Oh,' Mulder said. He sounded a little sick. 'Do you think there's any way I can quickly get it off my finger without betraying my cool exterior?'... Mulder hastily wiped his hand on the floor. — Ellen Steiber

All right, let's not panic. I'll make the money by selling one of my livers. I can get by with one. — Homer

The gods are deaf to hot and peevish vows. They are polluted off'rings, more abhorred! Than spotted livers in the sacrifice. — William Shakespeare

People do that - cling to their past because it's the only thing they consider safe. Trying something new or just accepting it turns their livers into jelly. But that's a load of bollocks. Ye take the new and appreciate it if it's good, like whiskey or poutine or girlfriends who bite, or ye dismiss it as shite if it's bad, like cell phones and cars, and move on. O — Kevin Hearne

Kelly glanced at the freezer as they headed for the steps. "Hey, maybe one of them will donate a liver to your dad."
Nick looked over his shoulder at Kelly, his eyes wide.
"I'm just saying. Three perfectly good livers sitting in there," Kelly said, completely deadpan. "Nobody's using them. I'll go get one for you."
Nick gaped at him. "How the hell did you ever pass your psych evals?"
"I cheated off your papers."
Nick rolled his eyes and started up the stairs.
"The Navy gives bubble tests. When in doubt, go with C."
"Kelly."
"Get it? Navy? The sea?"
"Kels, shut up."
"Oh, come on! You love puns."
Nick laughed, unable to stop himself. — Abigail Roux

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same order of magnitude as the number of stars in the Milky Way, it cannot account for the complexity of the brain. The liver probably contains 100 million cells, but 1,000 livers do not add up to a rich inner life. — Gerald Fischbach

The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip in to it; as for the red bloody meat, the steaming innards - they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution - and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked it's gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different. — Vasily Grossman

The heart was always seen as the noblest of the internal organs as well as the most vital. The hearts of martyrs or future candidates for sainthood would be preserved, but never their livers, say, or the entrails - at least not on their own; it was either the heart by itself or the whole lot together. — George Fetherling

Male novelists were granted a 'social tradition' in which to operate, Didion discovered" 'hard drinkers, bad livers, wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. — Tracy Daugherty

I think the great livers, the people who are fully self-actualizing and alive, are the great givers. — Mark Victor Hansen

The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes. — Robert Baden-Powell