“
Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
“
He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. "You're so hot," I said, my hand still on his leg.
"I'm starting to think you have an amputee fetish," he answered, still kissing me. I laughed.
"I have an Augustus Waters fetish," I explained.
”
”
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
“
Percy’d heard stories about amputees who had phantom pains where their missing legs and arms used to be. That’s how his mind felt—like his missing memories were aching.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Son of Neptune (The Heroes of Olympus, #2))
“
It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.
”
”
John Boyne (The Heart's Invisible Furies)
“
With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when [she] would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by [his] name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion--like the phantom pain of an amputee.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
“
I'm starting to think you have an amputee fetish" he answered, still kissing me. I laughed.
"I have an Augustus Waters fetish" I explained.
”
”
John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
“
If I ever saw an amputee getting hanged, I’d probably just start calling out letters.
”
”
Demetri Martin
“
I know I only have one arm, but I’d be proud to have you on it.
”
”
Willowy Whisper (Meet My Boyfriend)
“
Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: that amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
“
Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence streaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.
”
”
Alison Bechdel (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
“
I really had missed this guy, despite everything. But there was a reason why amputees survived and thrived; you learned how to live without.
”
”
Mariana Zapata (Hands Down)
“
His contagious conviction that our love was unique and desperate infected me with an anxious sickness; soon we would learn to treat one another with the circumspect tenderness of comrades who are amputees, for we were surrounded by the most moving images of evanesecence, fireworks, morning glories, the old, children. But the most moving of these images were the intagible relfections of ourselves we saw in one another's eyes, reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming, and, try as we might to possess the essence of each other's otherness, we would inevitably fail.
”
”
Angela Carter
“
It was a morning for Ella Fitzgerald. There are fine things in the world, after all. Dignity, refinement, warmth and humour, where you'd never expect to find them. Even as an old woman, an amputee in a wheelchair, Ella sang like a girl who could still be at high school, falling in love for the first time".
”
”
David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)
“
The clown figure has had so many meanings in different times and cultures. The jolly, well-loved joker familiar to most people is actually but one aspect of this protean creature. Madmen, hunchbacks, amputees, and other abnormals were once considered natural clowns; they were elected to fulfill a comic role which could allow others to see them as ludicrous rather than as terrible reminders of the forces of disorder in the world. But sometimes a cheerless jester was required to draw attention to this same disorder, as in the case of King Lear's morbid and honest fool, who of course was eventually hanged, and so much for his clownish wisdom. Clowns have often had ambiguous and sometimes contradictory roles to play. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin")
”
”
Thomas Ligotti (American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now)
“
Amputees suffer itches, cramps and even severe pains in a leg that is no longer there. It can be the same with love...
”
”
José N. Harris
“
Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn’t vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
“
I once saw a show about an amputee who lost his leg and still feels it. He actually wakes up at night to scratch his leg as if it’s still there, attached to him. They call it a phantom limb.
I would be like that. A phantom draki, tormented with the memory of what I once was.
”
”
Sophie Jordan (Firelight (Firelight, #1))
“
What do you think, little dhampir? I was pretty badass with that plant, wasn’t I? Of course, it would have been more badass if I’d, I dunno, helped an amputee grow a limb back. Or maybe separated Siamese twins. But that’ll come with more practice.
”
”
Richelle Mead (Shadow Kiss (Vampire Academy, #3))
“
It's not what I can do; it's what I will do. If you wake up and try to help one person and change that person's life, every obstacle you face in front of you is worth it.
”
”
Kyle Maynard (No Excuses: The True Story of a Congenital Amputee Who Became a Champion in Wrestling and in Life)
“
They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.
”
”
Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
“
She had not had the relief of amnesia. She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief.
”
”
Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
“
I've always believed that anyone can achieve their dreams, regardless. I've always had this attitude about no excuses. A belief that I can go on and do what I need to do. To go on, to succeed, regardless.
”
”
Kyle Maynard (No Excuses: The True Story of a Congenital Amputee Who Became a Champion in Wrestling and in Life)
“
I don't want to sound like a badass, but I eject my USB without removing it safely.
”
”
April White (Code of Conduct (Cipher Security, #1))
“
Holy Christ. A lower-arm amputee with cataracts could have backed this trailer more accurately than you,” Ove mutters as he gets into the car.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
“
She had suffered longer, and she had suffered more. Each second was agony in the first weeks. She was like an amputee in the days before anesthesia, half crazed with pain, astounded that the human body could feel so much and not die of it. But slowly, cell by painful cell, she began to mend. There came a time when it was no longer her whole body that burned with pain but only her heart. And then there came a time when even her heart was able, for a time at least, to feel other emotions besides grief... she learned how to exist apart.
”
”
Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
“
She could not avoid a profound feeling of rancor toward her husband for having left her alone in the middle of the ocean. Everything of his made her cry: his pajamas under the pillow, his slippers that had always looked to her like an invalid’s, the memory of his image in the back of the mirror as he undressed while she combed her hair before bed, the odor of his skin, which was to linger on hers for a long time after his death. She would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing and slap herself on the forehead because she suddenly remembered something she had forgotten to tell him. At every moment countless ordinary questions would come to mind that he alone could answer for her. Once he had told her something that she could not imagine: that amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches, in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez
“
It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials... smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.
”
”
Alison Bechdel (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
“
The Library of Congress reports that the Army Office of the Surgeon General for Medical Statistics "does not have figures on single or multiple amputees." Either the government doesn't think them important, or, in the words of a researcher for one of the national television networks, "the military itself, while sure of how many tons of bombs it has dropped, is unsure of how many legs and arms its men have lost.
”
”
Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun)
“
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.
Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated.
With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion—like the phantom pain of an amputee.
Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence...
It would flood her, steal her breath.
But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her feeling deflated, feeling noting but a vague restlessness.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
“
We are amputees in the realm of sex, and depravity is the prosthetic we use to stagger around the pleasure dome.
”
”
Supervert
“
It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?"
"The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.
”
”
John Boyne (The Heart's Invisible Furies)
“
I’m not going to be one of those amputees who dances and everyone finds inspiring. I’m not inspiring. I’m just me.
”
”
Katherine Locke (Finding Center (District Ballet Company, #2))
“
When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and--the crowning touch-- a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor.
”
”
Roberto Bolaño (Woes of the True Policeman)
“
AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively-i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
“
Pop's leg was across the room when I came downstairs.
”
”
Kathryn Miller Haines (The Girl Is Murder (The Girl is Murder, #1))
“
And, long after the amorous relation is allayed, I keep the habit of hallucinating the being I have loved: sometimes I am still in anxiety over a telephone call that is late, and no matter who is on the line, I imagine I recognize the voice I once loved: I am an amputee who still feels pain in his missing leg.
”
”
Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments)
“
Soldier on guard says they've identified “someone on two legs a hundred metres from the outpost”. The other soldier, in the lookout, says “A girl about ten,” but by then they're already shooting. Girl's dead[...]The point is this use of code, on two legs, denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts walking on two legs [...]The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking it to “if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?” [...] my thesis being that the occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us.
”
”
Selma Dabbagh (Out of It)
“
That's the problem with assumptions,” Dee says, whistling as he starts off down the path. “They make an ass out of you and shins—two of which we all have.” He pauses for a second before turning around to look at me. “Unless of course you're an amputee which then you could have one shin or none shin and then the only person that's an ass is you.
”
”
C.M. Stunich (Allison's Adventures in Underland (Harem of Hearts, #1))
“
Stop thinking of me as broken or not whole. Put that bullshit down and walk away. It's not doing you any good and it's insulting to me.
”
”
J.R. Ward (Consumed (Firefighters, #1))
“
She felt like an amputee, reaching out reflexively with an arm she no longer had.
”
”
Frances Hardinge (A Face Like Glass)
“
When I awoke on Wednesday afternoon, I understood how an amputee must feel.
”
”
Jerry Lewis (Dean and Me: A Love Story)
“
What does one call a mother who has lost a child? Amputee? That was how she felt. Now she was an amputated mother. How does one resign oneself to that? When?
”
”
Sofía Segovia (The Murmur of Bees)
“
She had been a mother and . . . What does one call a mother who has lost a child? Amputee? That was how she felt.
”
”
Sofía Segovia (The Murmur of Bees)
“
It’s not easy losing someone,” she said. “It never goes away, does it?” “The Phantom Pain, they call it,” I said. “Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.
”
”
John Boyne (The Heart's Invisible Furies)
“
he would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion-like the phantom pain of an amputee
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
“
Sam grinned. “Probably an acrotomophiliac. You know, less is more.” Taylor wrinkled her brow. “What the hell does that mean? It doesn’t sound good.” “Means he’s sexually attracted to amputees.
”
”
J.T. Ellison (All The Pretty Girls (Taylor Jackson, #1))
“
Those with hands cupped them for alms, those lacking in hands clenched the bill of a baseball cap in their teeth. Military amputees flapped empty sleeves like flightless birds, mute elderly beggars fixed cobra eyes on you, street urchins told tales taller than themselves about their pitiable conditions, young widows rocked colicky babies whom they might have rented, and assorted cripples displayed every imaginable, unappetizing illness known to man. Farther
”
”
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer)
“
There was death at the beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered.
The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a half hour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window.
There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.
”
”
Nicholas Evans (The Horse Whisperer)
“
You can be afraid and still strong, still fearless and indomitable. You can be afraid, and you can trust, and then when you're ready, you can let go of the fear. Fear muffles you. Let it go, and then you can live out loud again like you're meant to.
”
”
April White (Code of Conduct (Cipher Security, #1))
“
[Kinsey's studies included] stutterers, amputees, paraplegics, even those with cerebral palsy were observed. Kinsey wanted to document the full spectrum of human sexuality, but it was more than that. He believed these people might have things to teach us about the physiology of sex. And he was right. These groups alerted Kinsey--and the scientific community as a whole--to the complicated and crucial role of the central nervous system in sex and reproduction. Kinsey had noted that a stutterer in the throes of sexual abandon may temporarily lose his stutter. Similarly, the phantom limb pain some amputees feel temporarily disappears. Even the muscle spasticity of cerebral palsy may be briefly quieted. The body's limiting factors seem to get shut off. The organism is driven toward nature's singular goal--conception, the passing on of one's genes--and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.
”
”
Mary Roach (Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex)
“
I would, if one-armned and jonesing, doubtless have found a way to cook up a hearty spoon of Mexican tar and slam it with my toes. (I met a double amputee in San Francisco whose girlfriend slapped a bra strap around his throat and geezed him in the neck. Another triumph of the human spirit. But slap me if I get sentimental...)
”
”
Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight)
“
I no longer loved Albertine. At most there were occasional days which brought the kind of weather that, modifying and stimulating our sensitivity, restores our contact with reality, making me feel bitterly sad when I thought of her. I suffered from a love that no longer existed. Thus when the weather changes do amputees feel pain in the leg they have lost.
”
”
Marcel Proust (The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 6 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition))
“
At the back of my mind I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up since I didn’t seem to be getting any better at goalkeeping.
”
”
Ian Colquhoun
“
Flying kisses are ones that make your insides feel like you're accelerating to reach altitude, and the moment you begin to soar, your chest can fill with air again, and your body floats free. I never had a flying kiss and always thought Mum was talking romantic nonsense." He took a deep breath, looked back at his hands, and smiled. "Apparently, it wasn't nonsense.
”
”
April White (Code of Conduct (Cipher Security, #1))
“
It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.
”
”
Alison Bechdel (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
“
A few years later, they unveiled a new retinal implant that allowed any blind people who wished to be sighted to “see” perfectly inside the OASIS. And by linking two head-mounted mini cameras to the same implant, their real-world sight could be restored as well. The ARL’s next invention was a brain implant that allowed paraplegics to control the movements of their OASIS avatar simply by thinking about it. It worked in conjunction with a separate implant that allowed them to feel simulated sensory input. And the very same implants gave these individuals the ability to regain control of their lower extremities, while restoring their sense of touch. They also allowed amputees to control robotic replacement limbs, and to receive sensory input through them as well.
”
”
Ernest Cline (Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2))
“
Dad used to tell me about the guys at the VFW who could feel their amputated limbs. I feel like one of those guys-wiggling my weak tortured, pathetic self from only a month ago even though I've amputated him.
It's a little like being two people at once. One minute I feel like the old Lucky who had nothing, and the next minute I realize I have everything I could possibly need.
While I'm in the driveway, I hear the neighborhood kids playing. Normal kids doing normal things. They probably don't know that as of today more than 1,700 servicemen have still not been accounted for. They probably don't know that about 8,000 are still missing from Korea, or that approximately 74,000 never surfaced after World War II. They don't know that amputees sometimes try to wiggle limbs they lost.
I don't envy them. They have a lot to learn.
”
”
A.S. King
“
We must assume, I think, that the forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of all its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skipspace piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom extensions beyond the board, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
“
We must assume, I think, that
the forward projection of what imagination he had, stopped at the act, on the brink of
all its possible consequences; ghost consequences, comparable to the ghost toes of an
amputee or to the fanning out of additional squares which a chess knight (that skips-pace piece), standing on a marginal file, "feels" in phantom extensions beyond the
board, but which have no effect whatever on his real moves, on the real play.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
“
Whatever words get said in the heat of anger, or cold fear, or even calm conversation, it's your choice to believe them, and your choice to give them meaning. Because you know what? They are just words, and the only power words have over us is the power we give them.
”
”
April White (Code of Conduct (Cipher Security, #1))
“
At that time, a number of myths were created by the young people of the smoking carriages and forests of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the hungry for the thirst of lysergic acid, who were too tired of the suffering they grew up in and needed to take refuge in dreams. In these children's universe there were unbelievable stories about places in the mountains that women sought to retreat to, places where people were united by music and love for a mutual spiritual growth. For Aunt Jeanine, who had grown up with the image of her father, an amputee due to the war, feeding on such stories was like a haven, one she would later try to turn into her home. And one of those stories, one particular one, stood in her memory until the last stage of her life, when she passed away at eighty-one, burned with fire. (...) At that time, kid, they said that if we searched enough, we would find a place where the world wouldn't end. Men would never know what hell of a place that was, totally unconquerable! A place where the dirty hands of men would never arrive. A place men would never know about . Don't you think I could find it? To have my body disappearing in the woods, as I saw happening to kids in Japan, in that forest that swallows them to its core. Flesh turned to powder, my essence disappearing in the middle of life. They said that, when you die at a place, you'll stay at that place forever. That was why everyone was afraid to go to war. They weren't afraid of dying, kid, they were afraid of dying there.
”
”
Pat R (Os Homens Nunca Saberão Nada Disto)
“
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening. Time, blunting the edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed vital, suddenly, that she know.
Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated.
With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion - like the phantom pain of an amputee.
Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would all come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence. Their clumsiness. The pain of the act, the pleasure of it, the sadness of it. The heat of their entangled bodies.
It would flood her, steal her breath.
But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her deflated, feeling nothing but a vague restlessness.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
“
The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revolutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings). The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him). The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and—the crowning touch—a one-amred amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquianted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano's view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful.
”
”
Roberto Bolaño (Woes of the True Policeman)
“
The impact of second-class treatment on black people’s bodies is devastating. It is manifested not only in the black–white death gap but also in the drastic measures required when chronic disease is left unmanaged. Black patients are less likely than whites to be referred to kidney and liver transplant wait lists and are more likely to die while waiting for a transplant.68 If they are lucky enough to get a donated kidney or liver, blacks are sicker than whites at the time of transplantation and less likely to survive afterward. “Take a look at all the black amputees,” said a caller to a radio show I was speaking on, identifying the remarkable numbers of people with amputated legs you see in poor black communities as a sign of health inequities. According to a 2008 nationwide study of Medicare claims, whites in Louisiana and Mississippi have a higher rate of leg amputation than in other states, but the rate for blacks is five times higher than for whites.69 An earlier study of Medicare services found that physicians were less likely to treat their black patients with aggressive, curative therapies such as hospitalization for heart disease, coronary artery bypass surgery, coronary angioplasty, and hip-fracture repair.70 But there were two surgeries that blacks were far more likely to undergo than whites: amputation of a lower limb and removal of the testicles to treat prostate cancer. Blacks are less likely to get desirable medical interventions and more likely to get undesirable interventions that good medical care would avoid.
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Dorothy Roberts (Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century)
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Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette!
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
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Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
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(RIC), designers at Vanderbilt University and prosthetics company Freedom Innovations reached a breakthrough by creating artificial limbs that allow amputees to walk up stairs, rotate an ankle, and navigate sloped terrains merely by thinking about it.
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Bertalan Meskó (The Guide to the Future of Medicine (2022 Edition): Technology AND The Human Touch)
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George could dig and pour the concrete basement for a house. He could saw the lumber and nail the frame. He could wire the rooms and fit the plumbing. He could hang the drywall. He could lay the floors and shingle the roof. He could build the brick steps. He could point the windows and paint the sashes. But he could not throw a ball or walk a mile; he hated exercise, and once he took early retirement at sixty he never had his heart rate up again if he could help it, and even then only if it were to whack through some heavy brush to get to a good trout pool. Lack of exercise might have been the reason that, when he had his first radiation treatment for the cancer in his groin, his legs swelled up like two dead seals on a beach and then turned as hard as lumber. Before he was bedridden, he walked as if he were an amputee from a war that predated modern prosthetics; he tottered as if two hardwood legs hinged with iron pins were buckled to his waist. When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture. Once, she snorted out loud, trying to stifle a laugh, when she thought, My husband, the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.
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Paul Harding (Tinkers)
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They’d never had anyone on the show who was missing an arm before. They’d had amputees on the show, but with different injuries. Mine posed a bit more of a challenge for dance. They mentioned Amy Purdy, the double amputee, who had been on the show, so I said, “Yeah, Amy Purdy is amazing, a very athletic, very impressive woman, but she has both of her knees. I don’t have a knee on my left side.” The phone went silent for a little while. But it didn’t turn them off. They just resumed talking.
“Do you have any dance experience?”
“No.”
“Anytime in your life, if you were at a bar or a club, what did you do?”
“I stood at the bar and ran my mouth. That’s what I do. I have never danced in any capacity. I don’t dance.” I was not trying to sell myself to them at all. I was being straight with them.
Then they said, “If you decide to do it, we’ll put you in a house in L.A.”
I knew then I had to say no to this show. “Well, I’m sorry, I’ve got three kids here and I can’t be away that long.” And without hesitation Deena Katz, one of the executive producers, said, “That’s fine. Your dancer will come to where you are and that’s where you’ll rehearse and come back and forth. Where do you live?”
“Alabama.”
She just answered, “Okay.” I don’t think they thought about that, either. Alabama is a long way from Los Angeles. We talked a little while longer and that was it. I never said yes. They never said I was doing it.
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Noah Galloway (Living with No Excuses: The Remarkable Rebirth of an American Soldier)
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When at last we arrived in Mannheim, I found that my apartment had been rented to a family whose young son was an amputee. I had conscientiously paid our landlady the entire time we were gone and now that I returned and needed my apartment I couldn’t do anything about it. I felt upset that these people usurped what was ours and I didn’t find much comfort when they offered us one of the bedrooms to live in. Frustrated as I was, there was nobody I could turn to. The rule of law had been suspended, so the only thing I could do was accept their offer. As I moved into what had been my bedroom, they reluctantly agreed that I could share the kitchen and use one of the burners on the stove. Climbing up into the attic, I found a bed that my husband Richard had used when he was a student. Now I had to cram onto it with the children every night and it always became a contest as to who got the pillow. None of us got much rest but the experience did bring us closer together. Frequently I wound up on the floor.
Somehow I found a vicarious joy in seeing that my furniture, which the other family had been using, was becoming warped from moisture damage. It had been in a room where the window was blown out during one of the air raids. Of course this exposed everything to the weather, and so the frequent rains ruined the table and much of the other furniture. I really grew to dislike these people and with each passing day things became worse. One day while trying to balance three pots on one burner, I got an idea as to what I would do next….
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Hank Bracker
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Among Walter Reed amputees, physiotherapists had a reputation for being “all chesty,” often challenging (and beating) the nurses at a game of basketball.70
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Beth Linker (War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America)
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There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion - like the phantom pain of an amputee.
Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would all come rushing back.
...
It would flood her, steal her breath.
But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her deflated, feeling nothing but a vague restlessness.
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Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
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It’s tempting to imagine happiness as a state of mind caused by whatever is happening in your life. By that way of thinking, we’re largely victims of the cold, cold world that sometimes rewards our good work and sometimes punishes us for no reason. That’s a helpless worldview and it can blind you to a simple system for being happier. Science has done a good job in recent years of demonstrating that happiness isn’t as dependent on your circumstances as you might think. For example, amputees often return to whatever level of happiness they enjoyed before losing a limb. And you know from your own experience that some people seem to be happy no matter what is going on in their lives, while others can’t find happiness no matter how many things are going right. We’re all born with a limited range of happiness, and the circumstances of life can only jiggle us around within the range. The good news is that anyone who has experienced happiness probably has the capacity to spend more time at the top of his or her personal range and less time near the bottom.
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Scott Adams (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life)
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Or was she making a connection that wasn’t there, like an amputee who still feels a missing arm or leg long after it’s gone?
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Karin Slaughter (Fractured (Will Trent, #2))
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She had been a mother and . . . What does one call a mother who has lost a child? Amputee? That was how she felt. Now she was an amputated mother. How does one resign oneself to that? When?
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Sofía Segovia (The Murmur of Bees)
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I'm...in a prayer support group. That means several people are trying to figure out what to do with my life.
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Angie Vicars (My Barbie Was an Amputee)
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VIBRATION = ETHERIC Essentially, the etheric is the vibration layer: you sense the etheric while you feel the vibration. That assertion is too simplistic to be completely true, and some etheric levels of light and astral vibration can be discerned later. But the equation: ‘vibration= etheric’ is an excellent reference in the beginning to make sense of your experiences. Vibrating movement in your feet, for example, means that in the hands, the etheric life force is set in motion. Feeling the eyebrows movement means that the third eye's etheric layer is triggered...and more, for any part of your body, or even outside your body's limits. Not only does the etheric permeate the physical body, but it also spreads beyond it in proportions that may vary depending on different internal factors. When the vibration seems to be more intense in your hands or elsewhere, it means that you are coming into contact with the etheric body's deeper and more complex layers. We use external stimuli in the beginning to awaken the etheric vibration sensation. Afterward, without rubbing or using any other external stimulus, you can get the same feeling. The sound is going to come from within. Therefore, I would say that you do not think too much about whether the experience is real or etheric or theoretical in these first stages of training. Believe in your experience. A very simple evidence of the vibrations of non-physical nature would be to cut off your physical hand and know that you still feel the same vibration as in amputees ' phantom limb syndrome. Some signs of this vibration's non-physical nature would be that you will feel it in all kinds of places in your body, without any form of physical stimulation or rubbing. You will even sense it beyond the limits of your physical body, first around you, and then in objects that are increasingly distant. The etheric movement sense will then be completely separated from any physical sensation. In any case, please remember that there is nothing (and therefore nothing to doubt either) to believe in the approach. It is not what you believe that matters, but what you interpret. The constant focus is on learning directly. Know how to interpret this vibrating force and then determine how to comprehend it.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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Equally appalling was the death rate from such bacterial infections; at least 40 percent of amputees died from so-called hospital disease. In army hospitals that number approached 70 percent.
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Penny Le Couteur (Napoleon's Buttons)
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I imagined what cutting off a leg entailed, what it must have looked like lying beside the rest of his body. What does one do with a severed leg? I wondered.
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Karie Fugett (Alive Day: A Memoir)
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The unfamiliar body part--I was afraid to name it--was out in the open, his foot nowhere to be found. I was later told to call it a "stump," a word I would never feel comfortable saying. The empty space below his knee sucked the air out of my body until I was empty, too. And then I was running in the opposite direction. It was too permanent, too real. His foot was gone. It was just fucking gone.
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Karie Fugett (Alive Day: A Memoir)
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The next morning, the earth was strewn with debris from the windstorm the night before. An audience of trees looked down on severed limbs cast about the ground, their hunched and beaten postures reminding me of a congregation of amputees gathered in the wake of a war.
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John Burley
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Blaine, on the other hand, just doesn’t seem that reliable. He’s the type who would cheat on Barbie with one of those Bratz sluts and then lie about it in the morning, even as Barbie discovered the creepy telltale amputeed boot in Blaine’s sofa cushions.
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Celia Rivenbark (Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: And Other Words of Delicate Southern Wisdom)
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Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.
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Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
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Heather Mills
As a tireless campaigner for many charitable causes, Heather Mills joined Diana in support of the banishment of land mines all over the world. For her efforts against land mines, Ms. Mills was awarded the inaugural UNESCO Children in Need Award. She is also Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association, and she has been active in helping amputees by promoting the use of prostheses.
Diana, Princess of Wales, was a truly remarkable human being. All too often today we refer to people as icons; in Diana’s case, the word is wholly appropriate. She was a wife, a mother, a humanitarian, and a true ambassador.
Despite what the press wanted us to believe, Diana didn’t court publicity. On the contrary, she did far more behind the scenes to help people than in front.
Her willingness to reveal her own frailties has, I am sure, encouraged many people to seek help and come to terms with their own personal problems.
She was able to reach out to people in a way that few can. In the early days of HIV and AIDS, when everyone was so afraid of this so-called new disease, Diana’s simple gesture of shaking hands with an AIDS patient at a hospital in London broke down the taboo and removed the stigma around the disease. Her palace advisers had initially tried to dissuade her from making this gesture, but Diana--who always led with her heart--went against them and did what she believed to be right.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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Heather Mills
As a tireless campaigner for many charitable causes, Heather Mills joined Diana in support of the banishment of land mines all over the world. For her efforts against land mines, Ms. Mills was awarded the inaugural UNESCO Children in Need Award. She is also Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association, and she has been active in helping amputees by promoting the use of prostheses.
The memory of Diana walking through a minefield is how I remember her the most. We had been campaigning for years, and struggling to get people to sign the mine-ban treaty. When Diana decided to help, a great light was shone on the cause, and we have never looked back.
Her devastating death only catapulted the cause forward; every additional country that signed up for the treaty did so, I believe, as a tribute to her tireless work and dedication to helping others.
She was brave, she was genuine, she was warm, and she really cared about people. She was the people’s princess.
Remember--monuments are not erected to those who criticize, but rather to those who have been criticized.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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I feel the American’s eyes on me, looking as though I’m more than an amputee, a number, a chore. He crosses over to me, his strides large, a broad smile on his lips. “Veda? Did I say your name right?” “Yes, Doctor.” “Call me Jim. Please.” His left hand in his pocket, he holds his right hand out to me. As though we’re equals. “Thank you, Doctor—I mean—just Jim,” I say. He chuckles. “Haven’t done anything yet.” He has. No older man ever invited me to shake hands. No other adult ever asked me to call them by name. He even said “please” although I’m a patient.
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Padma Venkatraman (A Time to Dance)
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Ever since that day, I’ve been tainted. I know it and I regret it and I try not to judge. But in spite of my best efforts, I know I maintain a shred of skepticism, which is why, so many years later, I am still working with amputees. Because no one can fake an amputation. But even in the amputee clinic, it has been helpful for me to realize that there are some people who will never get better. Not because of their injuries, and not because of their physical therapist, but because of themselves. They will always be a victim. It
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Adele Levine (Run, Don't Walk: The Curious and Chaotic Life of a Physical Therapist Inside Walter Reed Army Medical Center)
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About the Civil War
The bloodiest war ever fought on United States soil was the Civil War. Brother fought against brother, father against son. The nation had split in two. Eleven states in the South left the Union in 1861 and formed the Confederacy, determined to govern themselves and hold slaves. Abraham Lincoln and the federal government did not agree. On April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter in South Carolina was attacked by Confederate forces. The Civil War had begun. When it finally ended four years later with a Union victory, more than 620,000 men and boys had been killed, and over 50,000 returned home as amputees.
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Gary Hines (Thanksgiving in the White House)
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Disability is not predictive of the happiness of either the parent or the child, which reflects the larger puzzle that people who have won the lottery are, in the long run and on average, only marginally happier than amputees—people in each category having adjusted rather quickly to their new normal.
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Andrew Solomon (Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity)
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He placed the platter on the table, and as the lid was lifted and set to the side, I was told that, 100 years ago, the taxidermist's grandfather witnessed a bar fight between two sailors. One was armed with a sabre, and the other, apparently, was disarmed with one. The amputee fell on his back, and as he lay there in shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist's grandfather looked down at the floor, at the blood-soaked fingers that may have still been twitching, and likely thought: Well, it's not like it's doing him any good.
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David Sedaris
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Lopez made sandals out of one tire. He sold them at ten cents each, because people sometimes needed only one.
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Warren Eyster (The Goblins of Eros)
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You don't limp at all. Your recovery is going well."
"Yes." Though whether someone ever fully recovered from losing a limb, he didn't know. He sure as hell hadn't. It had been five years, and still there were days when the pain in his nonexistent leg was enough to drive him out of his mind.
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Laura Oliva (A World Apart (Shades Below, #1))
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leg in an amputee. Over the centuries, medical treatment had become quite adept at fixing parts of the body that were broken: a shattered bone, or even a shattered mind;
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John Burley (The Absence of Mercy)
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A man can feel pain in an amputated arm (an arm that is not there). A man can also feel anxious when he thinks about how his soul will burn in the fire of hell when he is threatened by it though he cannot see it physically
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Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
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A Suicidal Amputee Tries to Kill Himself by Rolling Off His Bed, Down the Stairs, Through the Screen Door, and Into Traffic; Some Dominican Kids Poke Him With Sticks Too, and an Eagle Shits on Him
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Bradley Sands (Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy)
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continuous scans of the brain to measure changes in blood flow) could control a robot hundreds of miles away just by imagining moving different parts of his body. The subject could see from the robot’s perspective, thanks to a camera on its head, and when he thought about moving his arm or his legs, the robot would move correspondingly almost instantaneously. The possibilities of thought-controlled motion, not only for “surrogates” like separate robots but also for prosthetic limbs, are particularly exciting in what they portend for mobility-challenged or “locked in” individuals—spinal-cord-injury patients, amputees and others who cannot communicate or move in their current physical state.
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Eric Schmidt (The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business)
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Caution: if you are afraid of amputees, please avoid this story. Caution: if you are an amputee, please trust that I did not intend to insult you or your ilk (probably an unfortunate choice of words, since ilk sounds like a part of a word rather than a whole word), and please do not feel obligated to read this story. But,
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Brian Evenson (Song for the Unraveling of the World: Stories)
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Calling her felt like being an amputee who, believing she still has legs, keeps trying to stand.
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Coco Mellors (Blue Sisters)
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Someone once asked Todd White why God doesn’t heal amputees. Todd’s reply was, “How many amputees have you laid hands on?
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Praying Medic (Divine Healing Made Simple (The Kingdom of God Made Simple))
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I told Jane I had a very important role model in my life who embodied that indomitable spirit: my grandfather. “He lost his leg as a boy,” I said. “And even with a wooden leg he became a ballroom dancer and competitive tennis player! He became a neurosurgeon and performed a pioneering separation of conjoined twins, which he had been told was impossible. During World War Two, he would show the recent amputees how to live with a prosthetic and assure them that they could have a full life. He had a motto: ‘The difficult is hard, the impossible just a little harder.
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Jane Goodall
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I was an amputee, and like any amputee, I was left with the excruciating phantom pain of being tortured by my lost limb.
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Lucinda Berry (Phantom Limb)