Neurosurgery Quotes

“Neurosurgery seemed to present the most challenging and direct confrontation with meaning, identity, and death.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“After neurosurgery, I have learned that my brain is a boardinghouse where my waking consciousness rents one room with a hot plate and a black-and-white TV while the rest of the rooms are occupied by a random assortment of banshees, ghosts, mimes wearing eagle feathers, and approximately twelve thousand strangers who look exactly like me.”
― Sherman Alexie, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“Only the neurosurgeon dares to improve upon five billion years of evolution in a few hours.
The human brain. A trillion nerve cells storing electrical patterns more numerous than the water molecules of the world’s oceans. The soul’s tapestry lies woven in the brain’s nerve threads. Delicate, inviolate, the brain floats serenely in a bone vault like the crown jewel of biology. What motivated the vast leap in intellectual horsepower between chimp and man? Between tree dweller and moon walker? Is the brain a gift from God, or simply the jackpot of a trillion rolls of DNA dice?”
― Frank Vertosick Jr.

“It's the professional shame that hurts the most,' I said to him. I wheeled my bike as we walked along Fleet Street. 'Vanity really. As a neurosurgeon you have to come to terms with ruining people's lives and with making mistakes. But one still feels terrible about it and how much it will cost.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“Still, when you work in a hospital, the papers you file aren't just papers: they are fragments of narratives filled with risks & triumphs.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain & consciousness as for its intertwining of life & death.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“My book contains texts that I wrote during college, medical school and during my residency of neurosurgery. I could set the book �Thoughts from the hospital" as clippings thoughts”
― Julio Pereira, THOUGHTS FROM THE HOSPITAL