Stretcher Quotes & Sayings

I remember the noise of the bells ringing at school as the effigy of Guy Fawkes we'd prepared earlier was carried out on a canvas stretcher, hoisted on to the huge bonfire and set alight. Then the revelry would begin. My school friends and I would all have sparklers we passed around, lighting one from another. — Pippa Middleton

The vision seemed to enter the house with me - the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart - the heart of a conquering darkness. — Joseph Conrad

He who allows himself to be arrested for a crime he did not commit will be expelled from the party, but if he resists and comes to us on a stretcher, he is a hero. — Aminu Kano

As my body lay dead on that stretcher (he later recovered from being struck by lightning attracted by his cell phone), I was reliving every moment of my life, including my emotions, attitudes, and motivations. The depth of emotion I experienced during this life review was astonishing. Not only could I feel the way both I and the other person had felt when an incident took place, I could also feel the feelings of the next person they reacted to. I was in a chain reaction of emotion, one that showed how deeply we affect one another. — Dannion Brinkley

Each man in this stretcher party had gained a reflected majesty. They were footmen to death, and — Stephen Crane

Nell turned to the stretcher, took a deep breath, and peered down at the unconscious war hero. Immediately, a painful hollow feeling grew inside her, and her heart swelled with emotions from a time gone by. Even with the thick bandage across his eyes, she recognised this man. It was Jack Montgomery. Her pulse boomed as she paled with sickness. She gripped her wedding ring nervously, twisting it around and around. — LeeAnn Whitaker

She looked at Mad Rogan. "What did you do?"
Mad Rogan opened his mouth.
She turned to me. "What did he do?"
"He got hit by a car," I said.
The woman pivoted back to Mad Rogan. "Why in the world would you do a stupid thing like that?"
Mad Rogan opened his mouth again to say something.
"Don't you have an army of badasses to keep this exact thing from happening?"
"I..."
The woman turned to me. "What kind of car was it?"
"An armored Escalade," I said.
"Well, at least it was a nice car." She turned to Mad Rogan. "Who would want to ruin their nice car by hitting you with it?"
Mad Rogan sucked in a slow breath and let it out.
"Got you in the ribs, huh?" The woman waved. "Load both of them up."
"I can..." Mad Rogan started.
She pointed to a stretcher. "Down."
Mad Rogan lay down on the stretcher. — Ilona Andrews

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God's blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given. — Mary Roberts Rinehart

Then, at last, sitting on her stretcher-bed, she took from the very bottom of her pack an old peacock-blue scarf folded around a heavy, square book. She unwrapped it and opened it very carefully, as if guilty secrets might fall from between its pages like pressed flowers. This was Harry's secret. She was a writer. — Margaret Mahy

Saw him as a saint. His attitude silenced me. From that moment on, if he had been brought back to me dead on a stretcher, I would not have cared. He cannot hurt me any more. — Anais Nin

Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica, on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality: he abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched (his name was said to be Damastes, or Polyphemon, but he was nicknamed Procrustes, which meant "the stretcher"). — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You get so weak from eating pears that you fall down, and then they come and take you away on a stretcher. — Oliver Reed

Some of the pilgrims behind the stretcher carried his arms - two shot-guns, a heavy rifle, and a light revolver-carbine - the thunderbolts of that pitiful Jupiter. — Joseph Conrad

Do you need me to com ewith you? She'll need a stretcher," Kashnikov said.
"No she won't," said Alexander. "iI'll carry her myself. — Paullina Simons

You ever wonder what a Martian might think if he happened to land near an emergency room? He'd see an ambulance whizzing in and everybody running out to meet it, tearing the doors open, grabbing up the stretcher, scurrying along with it. 'Why,' he'd say, 'what a helpful planet, what kind and helpful creatures.' He'd never guess we're not always that way; that we had to, oh, put aside our natural selves to do it. 'What a helpful race of beings,' a Martian would say. Don't you think so? — Anne Tyler

No, there's fifteen francs somewhere, which nobody gives a damn about anymore and which nobody is going to get in the end anyhow, but the fifteen francs is like the primal cause of things and rather than listen to one's own voice, rather than walk out on the primal cause, one surrenders to the situation, one goes on butchering and butchering and the more cowardly one feels the more heroically does he behave, until a day when the bottom drops out and suddenly all the guns are silenced and the stretcher-bearers pick up the maimed and bleeding heroes and pin medals on their chest. — Henry Miller

Her blouse, and he saw the bruised imprints of two fingers. Just then a gang of blacks came out from among the trees carrying the wounded man on a rough stretcher. "Romantic, isn't it?" Sheldon sneered, following Joan's startled gaze. "And now I'll have to play surgeon and doctor him up. Funny, this twentieth-century — Jack London

Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin' Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn't know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn't long after that innovation that he applied for membership to NATO. Everybody else is in NATO. Why not the Crips? You going to tell me we wouldn't kick the shit out of Estonia? — Paul Beatty

They call it football, but the object of the game is to bash the other guy so hard that he's eventually carried off the field on a stretcher. I can't watch football anymore. My psychiatrist said it's better that way. I used to watch a game, see the players in a huddle - and think they were talking about me. — Jackie Mason

I was young and fearless in those days, but always enjoyed riding at Cartmel. They used to call me 'Cartmellor', probably because I kept coming back on a stretcher. — Stan Mellor

I was told that my diet was so poor that I could not repair the bones that were broken and operated on. So I have just had an Xradiograph taken; and lo! perfectly mended solid bone so beautifully white that I have left instructions that, if I die, a glove stretcher is to be made of me and sent to you as a souvenir — George Bernard Shaw

You know what I remember most vividly from that hospital? There were creases in the pillowcase.
"I was in pain when they brought me in. They'd bandaged me up before transporting me, but they hand't had anything to deaden that kind of pain. So I wasn't clear in my head. I don't remember who was holding the stretcher, anything like that.
"But when they lifted me up, and I looked at the cot I'd be transferred to, even as they tipped me onto it, I noticed the creases in the pillowcase, and it was everything I could do not to cry. You get used to things being dusty and gritty and oily, you really do, but then, when there's something clean, something that's been folded carefully, and unfolded carefully and it's there for your head, it's like your heart, it's like I don't know, I can't describe it. — Alison Jean Lester

He looked up, expecting to see a couple of EMTs bearing down on him with a stretcher, but his heart stuttered when the crowd shifted and Celida appeared. She stopped dead when she saw him, both hands flying up to cover her mouth and nose. Then she dropped her hands and raced toward him, dark ponytail streaming behind her. He watched her face crumple a second before she reached him and a different kind of pain lit up in his chest. Beat up as he was, there was no way he couldn't reach for her. He held out his — Kaylea Cross

Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
to gather us up.
We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.
If we say we can, we're lying.
If we say No, we don't see it,
That No will behead us
And shut tight our window onto spirit.
So let us rather not be sure of anything,
Beside ourselves, and only that, so
Miraculous beings come running to help.
Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,
We shall be saying finally,
With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.
When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,
We shall be a mighty kindness. — Rumi

It's an awful stretcher to believe that a peacock's tail was thus formed but ... most people just don't get it - I must be a very bad explainer — Charles Darwin

Now the Fox Moth 83 was by no means an aeroplane designed for passenger comfort. It only had enough room for two seats, a stretcher and the doctor. What's more, it was held together with little more than wood, cloth, string and wire. So they set off at top speed, which was about 80 miles an hour, in the old money; about a four-hour trip it was. — Bill Marsh

Without that discovery of the "moving photo," the world today would not be what it is: the new technology has become, primo, the principal agent of stupidity (incomparably more powerful than the bad literature of old: advertisements, television series); and secundo, the agent of worldwide indiscretion (cameras secretly filming political adversaries in compromising situations, immortalizing the pain of a half-naked woman laid out on a stretcher after a street bombing). It is true that film as art does also exist, but its significance is far more limited than that of film as technology, and its history is certainly shorter than that of any other art. — Milan Kundera

When Schulmann talked, he fired off conflicting ideas like a spread of bullets, then waited to see which ones went home and which came back at him. The sidekick's voice followed like a stretcher-party, softly collecting up the dead. ( ... ) Sound oil policy, sound economics, sound everything. Justice it isn't. (part I, chapter 1) — John Le Carre

Mouth to continue, Haymitch plummets off the stage and knocks himself unconscious. He's disgusting, but I'm grateful. With every camera gleefully trained on him, I have just enough time to release the small, choked sound in my throat and compose myself. I put my hands behind my back and stare into the distance. I can see the hills I climbed this morning with Gale. For a moment, I yearn for something ... the idea of us leaving the district ... making our way in the woods ... but I know I was right about not running off. Because who else would have volunteered for Prim? Haymitch is whisked away on a stretcher, and Effie Trinket is trying to get the ball rolling again. What an — Suzanne Collins

When you're 25, you can eat hamburgers and pizza and drink beer and stay out all night and come out the next day and drink a couple cups of coffee and just play. If I did that today, my heart would stop and I'd need a stretcher and an IV. — Mike Piazza

You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something - you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what Frank Stella said famously: What you see is what you see. — Frank Stella

And so it came to pass that i was strapped to a gurney and covered in raw liver and slabs of beef that very quickly turned rancid under the bright spotlights. there exists a videotape somewhere that documents me being wheeled about the dance floor by two burly "orderlies," while i desperately search for a bathroom big enough to accommodate the stretcher so i can do a bump of cocaine. watching me retch from the decomposing meat, and simultaneously fiend for drugs, makes for an entertaining time, indeed.
when i told my mother the extremes i went to in order to make a living, she just shook her head and said, "now don't you wish you'd finished college, dear?"
mothers are so wise, sometimes. — James St. James

From the ground. They waded waist-deep in the grass, in a compact body, bearing an improvised stretcher in their midst. Instantly, in the emptiness of the landscape, a cry arose whose shrillness pierced the still air like a sharp arrow — Joseph Conrad

I'm not a Christian because I need a crutch. Hey, I need a stretcher! — Steve Farrar

So what is it really like? What happens when people die? Noor asks Alice Bhatti, who after finishing her shift has changed into a loose maxi and is lying down on a wheelie stretcher, her forearm covering her eyes. A half-torn poster on the wall behind the stretcher says : Bhai, your blood will bring a revolution. Someone has scrawled under it with a marker: And that revolution will bring more blood. Someone has added Insha'allah in an attempt to introduce divine intervention into the proceedings. Some more down-to-earth soul has tried to give this revolution a direction, and drawn an arrow underneath and scribbled, Bhai, the Blood Bank is in Block C. — Mohammed Hanif

Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,
Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,
I blunder through the splashing mirk; and then
Hear the gruff muttering voices of the men
Crouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.
Hark! There's the big bombardment on our right
Rumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glare
Of flickering horror in the sectors where
We raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,
Or crawling on their bellies through the wire.
"What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"
Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:
Why did he do it? ... Starlight overhead
Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead. — Siegfried Sassoon