The Doctor To The Dead Quotes & Sayings

Latro, California: "Terrible diarrhea, Doctor, and I feel so weak!" "Take these pills and come back in three days if you're not better."
Parkington, Texas: "Terrible diarrhea ... " "Take these pills ... "
Hainesport, Louisiana: "Terrible ... " "Take ... "
Baker Bay, Florida ...
Washington, DC ...
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ...
New York, New York ...
Boston, Massachusetts ...
Chicago, Illinois: "Doctor, I know it's Sunday, but the kid's in such a terrible state - you've got to help me!" "Give him some junior aspirin and bring him to my office tomorrow. Goodbye."
EVERYWHERE, USA: a sudden upswing in orders for very small coffins, the right size to take a baby dead from acute infantile enteritis. — John Brunner

I, the unfortunate Doctor Polyakov, who became addicted to morphine in February of this year, warn anyone who may suffer the same fate not to attempt to replace morphine with cocaine. Cocaine is a most foul and insidious poison. Yesterday Anna barely managed to revive me with camphor injections and today I am half dead. — Mikhail Bulgakov

I was not a good doctor, my studies had been too rapid, my hospital training too short, but there is not the slightest doubt that I was a successful doctor. What is the secret of success? To inspire confidence. What is confidence? ... I do not know, I only know that it cannot be acquired by book reading, nor by the bedside of our patients. It is a magic gift granted by birth-right to one man and denied to another. The doctor who possesses this gift can almost raise the dead — Axel Munthe

The fatal combination of indulgence without feeling disgusts me. Strange to be both greedy and dead. For myself, I prefer to hold my desires just out of reach of appetite, to keep myself honed and sharp. I want the keen edge of longing. it is so easy to be a brute and yet it has become rather fashionable. Is that the consequence of leaving your body to science? Of assuming that another pill, another drug, another car, another pocket-sized home-movie station, a DNA transfer, or the complete freedom of choice that five hundred TV channels must bring, will make everything all right? Will soothe the nagging pain in the heart that the latest laser scan refuses to diagnose? The doctor's surgery is full of men and women who do not know why they are unhappy. "Take this", says the Doctor, "you'll soon feel better." They do not feel better, because, little by little, they cease to feel at all. — Jeanette Winterson

Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can an armistice for a mother bereaved of a son or for a man who buries his friend. — Albert Camus

His view of me and my ways were expressed with some degree of force to our family physician who, when at the age of a hundred and fifty-three I came down with the mumps, having summoned the whole family and said that I would burst before morning, was met by a reassuring observation from Adam that he wouldn't believe I was dead even if I had been buried a year. "It is the good who die young, Doctor," he said. "On that principle this young malefactor will live to be the oldest man in the world. — John Kendrick Bangs

...People stop, stare. No one stop and stare if one of your own beggars drop dead in street. No just step over him like he is a stone, or a dog turd and go away quickly. But when they see a white man with golden hair lying on the street, everyone stop, everyone cry, "Hai - hai, - poor boy, call doctor, call ambulance. What has happen, Farrokh-bhai?"..."

- Farrokh said to Baumgartner when he wanted to get rid of the reluctant, overly drugged homeless foreigner out of his restaurant. (Page 167) — Anita Desai

[Many people] are happy to follow the advice of their smartphones or to take whatever drug the doctor prescribes, but when they hear of upgraded superhumans, they say: 'I hope, I will be dead before that happens — Yuval Noah Harari

I am sometimes amazed at what we did not fully grasp in kindergarten. In the years I was a parish minister I was always taken aback when someone came to me and said. 'I've just come from the doctor and he told me I have only a limited time to live'. I was always tempted to shout 'WHAT? You didn't know? You had to pay a doctor to tell you - at your age? Where were you the week in kingergarten when you got the little cup with the cotton and water and seed? Life happened - remember? A plant grew up and the roots grew down. A miracle. And then a few days later the plant was dead. DEAD. Life is short. Were you asleep that week or home sick or what? — Robert Fulghum

Is there a doctor in the house?" Bobby's voice floated into the room. My heart fluttered, just as it had the first time I'd met him, just as it did every time. The low timbre of his voice, combined with his rolling southern accent, made my pulse race and my palms sweat....
"She is. Is there someone in need of medical attention?" I answered, trying not to sound breathless but failing, as I always did....
Not answering but stopping right in front of me, placing his hands on my shoulders and leaning forward, the sexiest man in Georgia kissed me just a teeny bit senseless amid the dead bodies, antiseptic smells, and right in front of Reggie. — Julia Mills

(Taken from the scene in which protagonist Rebeka is caught snooping around down in the underground floors of Project Code-X...)
"I was just curious as to what was down here," I said boldly.
He studied me, evaluating the situation carefully. His face relaxed.
"They say curiosity is the mark of a great scientist," he mused light-heartedly. "It is often the loss of that child-like curiosity that ends the career of many a great scientist prematurely. Their minds go dead and they are no longer inspired. Once that light goes, they are completely and utterly useless to me."
He had a habit of ruminating aloud, so I said nothing. Then perceiving me again, he took me by the arm. "Well now, Doctor Taft. Let me show you precisely what we are doing down here in the basement," he said, proceeding to guide me around the corridor. — S.J. Robinson

Doctor." Gideon set one ankle on the opposite knee and settled back, creating a picture of unyielding decisiveness.
"The only way I'm keeping my hands off her is if I'm dead. Find another way to fix us."
Chapter 3 pg 50 — Sylvia Day

I took my grandmother to the emergency room. The doctor said that she was on an artificial life support system, and that although her brain was dead her heart was still beating. I though, "we've never had a democrat in the family before". — Emo Philips

Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead. We knew. That's what gave her such power over us. The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated in there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere. — Denis Johnson

The doctor's voice was cold. "There's nothing to put back. There's no body to go back to. The body of Lia Kahn is dead. Be grateful you didn't die with it. — Robin Wasserman

Everybody knew that Theodore Dinkins was dead. But Theodore Dinkins sat on the graveyard fence and said that he was not; and grew angry if contradicted. — John Bennett

Her brain was acutely damaged in the accident.

When the doctor was coming out of the ICU, he feared.
He made an evil prayer.

"I am fine to live with her memories,
I will settle myself with the very
thought that she isn't anymore, happily and gently.

But dear God,
don't make her lose her conscious,
like a dead yet, living body.
Coldness in the eyes,
which I have seen filled with love and surprise
will kill me every day.

I don't want to die a new death every minute.
Take her away,
Or give her back in whole. — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

The question is," Harry whispered, trying desperately to joke, "whether it's better to be dead from the neck up or the neck down," and the doctor smiled, knowing Harry was protecting himself with his sense of irony. — Morley Callaghan

They never look very big on the table, the bodies. It's built to accommodate the largest frames, there's that. And they're naked. But it's something else. That parcel of the being called the soul-weighing twenty-one grams, according to the experiments of the American doctor Duncan MacDougall-takes up a surprising amount of space, like aloud voice. In its absence, the body seems to shrink — Yann Martel

So, Mr. Shane, you felt you had the right to come down here and bespoil my crime scene because ... " He raised his eyebrows, waiting for an answer. "I thought he might need assistance," Shane lied. "And the untoward angle of his neck did not tell you that he was beyond any earthly assistance you might render?" "I'm not a doctor, sir," Shane said. "Neither are you a miracle worker, son," Xavier said. "Should you find any other bodies in my jurisdiction, you will refrain from attempting to raise them from the dead. — Jennifer Crusie

Don't tell thin women to eat a cheeseburger. Don't tell fat women to put down the fork. Don't tell underweight men to bulk up. Don't tell women with facial hair to wax, don't tell uncircumcised men they're gross, don't tell muscular women to go easy on the dead-lift, don't tell dark-skinned women to bleach their vagina, don't tell black women to relax their hair, don't tell flat-chested women to get breast implants, don't tell "apple-shaped" women what's "flattering," don't tell mothers to hide their stretch marks, and don't tell people whose toes you don't approve of not to wear flip-flops. And so on, etc, etc, in every iteration until the mountains crumble to the sea. Basically, just go ahead and CEASE telling other human beings what they "should" and "shouldn't" do with their bodies unless a) you are their doctor, or b) SOMEBODY GODDAMN ASKED YOU. — Lindy West

Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends ... No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word ... choked forever. — Jack Kerouac

You should tell her." "Tell her what?" "What the doctor told us," she said, not bothering to mince her words. "You should tell her that if you keep riding, you'll most likely be dead in less than a year. — Nicholas Sparks

You see, even after decades of therapy and workshops and retreats and twelve-steps and meditation and even experiencing a very weird session of rebirthings, even after rappeling down mountains and walking over hot coals and jumping out of airplanes and watching elephant races and climbing the Great Wall of China, and even after floating down the Amazon and taking ayahuasca with an ex-husband and a witch doctor and speaking in tongues and fasting (both nutritional and verbal), I remained pelted and plagued by feelings of uncertainty and despair. Yes, even after sleeping with a senator, and waking up next to a dead friend, and celebrating Michael Jackson's last Christmas with him and his kids, I still did not feel - how shall I put this? - mentally sound. — Carrie Fisher

The brilliant escape, the funny line to cap it, despite the lack of timing. And the girl was still dead. The last act had not materialised. The world, and himself, remained so far from what they should be: so imperfect. — Paul Cornell

Oliver, we've got something to tell you," Dad says, dumping a cardboard box full of garden waste into a toad green mangler.
Unlike the doctor, when Dad says we, he means we because Mum is omnipotent.
"Who's dead?" I ask, shot-putting a bottle of Richebourg.
"No one's dead."
"You're getting a divorce?"
"Oliver."
"Mum's preggers?"
"No, we - "
"I'm adopted."
"Oliver! Please, shit up! — Joe Dunthorne

She's a person; the doctor pronounces her dead, not the news. — Aaron Sorkin

Don't play games with me! You just killed someone I like, that is not a safe place to stand! I'm the Doctor, and you're in the biggest library in the Universe. Look me up. — Steven Moffat

We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape. — Sylvia Plath

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I sat with my feet up on my desk and started to make a mental list of the people who'd want me dead. Once I got to fifty, I decided this wasn't helping. — Melody Malone

Our frog lies on her back. Waiting for a prince to come and princessify her with a smooch? I stand over her with my knife. Ms. Keen's voice fades to a mosquito whine. My throat closes off. It is hard to breathe. I put out my hand to steady myself against the table. David pins her froggy hands to the dissection tray. He spreads her froggy legs and pins her froggy feet. I have to slice open her belly. She doesn't say a word. She is already dead. A scream starts in my gut - I can feel the cut, smell the dirt, leaves in my hair. I don't remember passing out. David says I hit my head on the edge of the table on my way down. The nurse calls my mom because I need stitches. The doctor stares into the back of my eyes with a bright light. Can she read the — Laurie Halse Anderson

Hello, Presley residence."

"Mrs. Presley, this is Dallas Memorial. I have - "

Penny started to weep. "Oh my God, he's dead, isn't he?"

"No, no, Mrs. Presley. Quite the contrary. The doctor wanted you to know that we think your husband is waking up."

Penny's emotions shuddered to a stop. Not dead? Not dead after all? Waking up? What the hell was all this about? — Sharon Sala

Clary, what am I going to do? My mom keeps bringing me food and I have to throw it out the window-I haven't been outside in two days, but I don't know how much longer I can go on pretending I have the flu. Eventually she's going to bring me to the doctor, and then what? I don't have a heartbeat. he'll tell her that I'm dead."
"Or write you up as a medical miracle," said Clary.
-Simon and Clary, pg.216- — Cassandra Clare

Nurse: "Doctor, the man you just gave a clean bill of health to dropped dead right as he was leaving the office". Doctor: "Turn him around, make it look like he was walking in." — Henny Youngman

The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it. — Tea Obreht

She said to herself: 'Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream has not worn it - infants, angels, priests, the dead; why - should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?' She thought: 'He dresses to lie beside himself, who is so constructed that love, for him, can be only something special; in a room that giving back evidence of his occupancy, is as mauled as the last agony. — Djuna Barnes

Don't blink. Don't even blink." she whispered.
"What in the hell are you talking about?" Aiden looked around trying to identify a hidden threat.
"You blink and you're dead." Meryn stared at the two large stone angels on either side of a heavy looking wooden door unblinking. Aiden's hand went to his sidearm.
"Meryn, that is just a statue."
"But what if it isn't? I mean up until this week I didn't think paranormals existed and now you're all over the fucking place. I can't take the chance. — Alanea Alder

She's dead, said the doctor's wife, and her voice was expressionless, if it were possible for such a voice, as dead as the word it had spoken, to have come from a living mouth. — Jose Saramago

Save your shaming for the girl, Doctor. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago." He turned and started wading into the swamp. "Time is passing. I, for one, have no intention of remaining here for your betrayer to bring back the soldiers and their guns. — Paolo Bacigalupi