“
Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage)
“
Needle and thread flesh and bone
Spit and sinew, heartbreak is home.
Your suture lines, they sparkle like diamonds
Bright stars to light my confinement
“Stitch,
”
”
Gayle Forman (Where She Went (If I Stay, #2))
“
Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
”
”
China Miéville (The Scar (New Crobuzon, #2))
“
Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald. Or if, with the reticence of a surgeon's hands, your words suture only the places where blood might flow. We know you can never do it properly - once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. You, old woman, blessed with blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
”
”
Toni Morrison (The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993)
“
You have to be out of your mind. What kind of clinic lets people operate on themselves?” “Well, Suture Self.”
”
”
Steve Bates (Back To You)
“
Forgiveness is a kind of time travel, only better, because it sutures the wounds of the past with the wisdom of the present in the same moment as it promises a better future.
”
”
C.J. Cooke (The Lighthouse Witches)
“
What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania.
“She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—”
“Where did she get it from?”
“Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.”
Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut.
Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.”
Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound.
He was barely breathing.
“The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so
low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a
catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her
draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in
her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure,
told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out
of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage,
to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?
”
”
Paullina Simons (The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman, #1))
“
Back into your box, anonymous Yorick, with your sutured eyes and frozen scream! The indignity of your internment is no worse than ours.
”
”
Rick Yancey (The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist, #1))
“
For some reason, I thought Victor could heal that wound better than anyone else. It's strange to think that this vampire, the embodiment of all my hatred, could act like a suture.
”
”
J.A. London (Darkness Before Dawn (Darkness Before Dawn #1))
“
It was the chance--just the chance--to come fully alive; to love someone else so completely that you would never again feel alone. That was it, wasn’t it? The promise of being engulfed by love and passion and intimacy; to connect in a way that gently sutured together the souls.
”
”
Jonathan Hull (Losing Julia)
“
The city’s a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too.
”
”
China Miéville
“
The Buddha taught that all human suffering is rooted in desire. Don't we all know this to be true? Any of us who have ever desired something and then didn't get it (or, worse, got it and subsequently lost it) know full well the suffering of which the Buddah spoke. Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody - really want him - it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause you lacerating injury. All you know is that you must obtain the object of your desire by any means necessary, and then never be parted. All you can think about is your beloved. Lost in such primal urgency, you no longer completely own yourself. You have become an indentured servant to your own yearnings.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage)
“
Stories suture up our wounds, stitch us back together. They keep our loved ones alive.
”
”
Kira Jane Buxton (Feral Creatures (Hollow Kingdom, #2))
“
used tight as sutures and orné with ossiform stucco and curlicues
”
”
Sfarda L. Gül (Non Serviam (The Hypostasis of Dissent, #1))
“
...if everybody is born essentially good, what is wrong with our society that it so often allows the goodness to go into hiding? It is easier, I suppose, just to believe that some people are born inherently evil.
”
”
Rosamund Kendal (The Karma Suture)
“
[A]s you will come to see, everything in life comes at a price. Nothing is free, not a single thing, tangible or intangible. There is an equilibrium at play all the time. For every gain, there is a loss of equal value. For every heart that is broken, one is sutured. It’s called balance, and it’s the only reason the universe doesn’t collapse onto itself at any given moment.
”
”
Richard Harris (A Father's Son)
“
The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic. “I could use one of those right over my heart,” you say.
”
”
Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City)
“
While the two words often arrive sutured together, I think it worthwhile to breathe some space between them, so that one might see “brutal honesty” not as a more forceful version of honesty itself, but as one possible use of honesty. One that doesn’t necessarily lay truth barer by dint of force, but that actually overlays something on top of it—something that can get in its way. That something is cruelty.
”
”
Maggie Nelson (The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning)
“
After the second surgery, the orthopedist asked me if I’d regret not riding anymore. I looked at her as if she were the mad one, told her I’d be back on as soon as the sutures were out.
”
”
Geraldine Brooks (Horse)
“
Surgery, clamps, sutures, bandages, antibiotics Mop Sucking chest wound Anesthesia, surgery Cork Cancer Chemotherapy, radiation, surgery Casket wreath* 13 Diabetes Insulin Leeches* 14 Hatchet embedded in skull Removal of hatchet, treatment of wound Larger hat Eyes gouged out in hospital by psychopath posing as nurse Prosthetic eyeballs, therapy Six-pack Source:
”
”
Dave Barry (Dave Barry's Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?)
“
More and more the world resembles an entomologist's dream. The earth is moving out of its orbit, the axis has shifted; from the north the snow blows down in huge knife-blue drifts. A new ice age is setting in, the transverse sutures are closing up and everywhere throughout the corn belt the fetal world is dying, turning to dead mastoid. Inch by inch the deltas are drying out and the river beds are smooth as glass. A new day is dawning, a metallurgical day, when the earth shall clink with showers of bright yellow ore. As the thermometer drops, the form of the world grows blurred; osmosis there still is, and here and there articulation, but at the periphery the veins are all varicose, at the periphery the light waves bend and the sun bleeds like a broken rectum.
”
”
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
“
Start on clavicle. Remove middle third. Control and divide subsc art and vein. Divide large nerve trunks around these as prox as poses. Then come onto chest wall immed anterior and divide Pec maj origin from remaining clav. Divide pec minor insertion and (very imp) divide origin and get deep to serrates anterior. Your hand sweeps behind scapula. Divide all muscles attached to scapula. Stop muscle bleeding with count suture. Easy! Good luck. Meirion
”
”
David Nott (War Doctor Surgery on the Front Line:)
“
We both know there's no returning to the beginning, no knowing who you've always been, no going home again. But we also know that there's no staying where you are: that the moment that your body sutures together into a whole and steady place you know, something will give way and you'll be changed to mere parts again.
”
”
Molly McCully Brown (Places I've Taken My Body: Essays)
“
Bekka treated her role has Frankenstein's bride more like an audition to be Brett's bride. Every part of her body had been colored bright kelly green - even parts that her mother had stressed were 'not to be seen by anyone except God and the inside of a toilet bowl.' Instead of wearing a wig, Bekka had teased and then shellacked her own hair into a windblown cone and she'd used female-mustache bleach to create white streaks. Her seams, made of real suture thread, had been attached to her neck and wrists with clear double-sided costume tape because drawing them on with kohl would not have been 'honoring the character.' Her Costume Castle dress had been exchanged for something 'more authentic' from the Bridal Barn. If Brett didn't see his future in her heavily black-shadowed eyes tonight, he never would. Or so she believed.
”
”
Lisi Harrison (Monster High (Monster High, #1))
“
sutures, bandages, antibiotics Mop Sucking chest wound Anesthesia, surgery Cork Cancer Chemotherapy, radiation, surgery Casket wreath* 13 Diabetes Insulin Leeches* 14 Hatchet embedded in skull Removal of hatchet, treatment of wound Larger hat Eyes gouged out in hospital by psychopath posing as nurse Prosthetic eyeballs, therapy Six-pack Source:
”
”
Dave Barry (Dave Barry's Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar?)
“
Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study. That continually rewound and remade claim upon our monstrosity—our miracle, our showing, which is neither near nor far, as Spillers shows—is black feminism, the animaterial ecology of black and thoughtful stolen life as it steals away.
”
”
Fred Moten (Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being))
“
The doppelganger nature of the country’s identity is embedded in the dualistic language used to describe it, in which everything is double and never singular: Israel-Palestine, Arab and Jew, Two States, The Conflict. Based on a fantasy of symmetrical power, this suturing together of two peoples implies conjoined twins in a state of unending struggle, an irresolvable sibling rivalry between the two peoples, both descended from Abraham. For Rooney, Israel as doppelganger exists on two levels. First, it is a doppelganger of the forms of chauvinistic European nationalisms that turned Jews into pariahs on the continent since well before the Inquisition. That was Zionism’s win-win pitch to anti-Semitic European powers: you get rid of your “Jewish problem” (i.e., Jews, who will leave your countries and migrate to Palestine), and Jews get a state of their own to mimic/twin the very forms of militant nationalism that had oppressed them for centuries. (This is why Zionism was so fiercely opposed by the members of the Bund, who believed that nationalism itself was their enemy and the wellspring of race hatred.) Israel also became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism. Many of Zionism’s basic rationales were thinly veiled Judaizations of core Christian colonial conceptions: Terra Nullius, the claim that continents like Australia were effectively empty because their Indigenous inhabitants were categorized as less than fully human, became “A land without a people for a people without a land”—a phrase adopted by many Zionists and that originated with nineteenth-century Christians. Manifest Destiny became “land bequeathed to the Jews by divine right.” “Taming the wild frontier” became “making the desert bloom.
”
”
Naomi Klein (Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World)
“
I have a theory that doctors are permanently tired as they are always fighting off some new virus to which they have been exposed.
”
”
Rosamund Kendal (The Karma Suture)
“
Sainthood is not a prerequisite for acceptance to medical school. Perhaps it should be.
”
”
Rosamund Kendal (The Karma Suture)
“
Aggressively yelling at a boy is as effective as attempting to stitch up a wound with a needle and no suture. Discipline without love is ineffectual.
”
”
Jason Wilson (Cry Like a Man: Fighting for Freedom from Emotional Incarceration)
“
i can suture one hundred years of open wounds women bleeding from the inside
”
”
Michaela Angemeer (Poems for the Signs)
“
Forgiveness is a kind of time travel, only better, because it sutures the wounds of the past with the wisdom of the present in the same moment as it promises a better future.
”
”
C J Cooke
“
The steam trains crossed the country, the gleaming tracks clumsy sutures across wounded miles of stolen land.
”
”
Libba Bray (Lair of Dreams (The Diviners, #2))
“
Past traumas are like old scars on tissue that never quite healed properly – they occasionally must be cut open, re-examined, and sutured anew.
”
”
Sarah Hackley (Women Will Save the World)
“
Let scars form where the sutures fail, and keep on going.
”
”
Anna Whateley (Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal)
“
The horse’s muscular legs ended in flesh, the equally muscular torso of a man. I stared—at that impossible suture of horse and human, where smooth skin became a gleaming brown coat.
”
”
Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
“
The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding...
”
”
William Gibson
“
Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire. I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts. I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatrual process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.
”
”
Susan Stryker (My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage)
“
Stepmothering arises from, and cannot be disentangled from, loss. In all senses—etymological, historical, and social—the stepfamily experience is sutured to, inextricable from, the experience of mourning.
”
”
Wednesday Martin (Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do)
“
I believe that the emergency room policy in which saying “I have had severe psychotic depression exacerbated by extreme pain” is treated much the same as saying “I have to have a woolly teddy bear with me before you can use sutures” is unacceptable.
”
”
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon)
“
His mission is not to wait until the world ends, but to find a way to the other side before it does. To prop open the door before it can be locked. To tie a suture before the fatal wound is made. To let in the moonlight before the sun is allowed to rise.
”
”
Thomas Lloyd Qualls (Painted Oxen)
“
There are many ways to deal with pain. You can protect the wound and wait until it heals or, at the very worst, remove the inflamed area and suture the wound. But in my case, the world never gave me time to heal. They took turns clawing and hacking at my wound.
”
”
Min-gyu Park (Pavane for a Dead Princess)
“
But the work somehow sutured a fracture inside me. A work of unbreakable links and collaboration, each plant cut, picked, lifted, and carried from one container to another in such timely harmony that no stalk of tobacco, once taken from the soil, ever touches ground again.
”
”
Ocean Vuong
“
I cannot shun the past because it contains information that is useful to script future goals. Looking back into the opaque window of reductive retrospect, what essential opportunities exist today that beckon one to seek with unrestrained enthusiasm? What iridescent signals flare from our conceptual self that if we heedlessly ignore their luminous summons, such deliberate acts of omission will suture the apex of our souls, relegating us to the dreaded curse of mucking along in an ordinary life stalled out by our overweening fear of estrangement?
”
”
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
“
The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music, seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, Is faith, it appears—faith of the eye, faith of the ear. —Charles Wright, “Body and Soul II
”
”
Aja Gabel (The Ensemble)
“
If you never knew
the worlds in my mind
your sense of loss
would be small pity
and we’ll forget this on the trail.
Take what you’re given
and turn away the screwed face.
I do not deserve it,
no matter how narrow the strand
of your private shore.
If you will do your best
I’ll meet your eye.
It’s the clutch of arrows in hand
that I do not trust
bent to the smile hitching my way.
We aren’t meeting in sorrow
or some other suture
bridging scars.
We haven’t danced the same
thin ice
and my sympathy for your troubles
I give freely without thought
of reciprocity or scales on balance.
It’s the decent thing, that’s all.
Even if that thing
is a stranger to so many.
But there will be secrets
you never knew
and I would not choose any other way.
All my arrows are buried and
the sandy reach is broad
and all that’s private
cools pinned on the altar.
Even the drips are gone,
that child of wants
with a mind full of worlds
and his reddened tears.
The days I feel mortal I so hate.
The days in my worlds,
are where I live for ever,
and should dawn ever arrive
I will to its light awaken
as one reborn.
Poet’s Night iii.iv
The Malazan Book of the Fallen
Fisher kel Tath
”
”
Steven Erikson (The Crippled God (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #10))
“
Of the six million species on the planet, only man makes language. Words. What's more--in evidence of the Divine--we string those symbols together and then write them down, where they take on a life of their own and breathe outside of us. Story is the bandage of the broken. Sutures of the shattered. The tappestry upon which we write our lives. Upon which we lay the bodies of our dying and the about-to-come-to-life. And if it's honest, true, hind nothing, revealing all, then it is a raging river and those who ride it find they have something to give--that they are not yet empty.
”
”
Charles Martin (Unwritten)
“
Urafa bestari kerap berpesan: "ilmu fis sudur la fis sutur"
Ilmu dalam dada membangunkan umat dari lena tidur
Wajib menulis pada khalayak semasa dan sepanjang zaman
Merungkai yang kusut, menerangi gelap fikiran, kabur pandangan
Tetap menghidupkan prinsip bukan berubah mengikut masa
Ilmu berakar dalam jiwa bukan jubah, serban, jangut berhenna.
”
”
Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud (Mutiara Taman Adabi : Sebuah Puisi Mengenai Agama, Filsafat dan Masyarakat)
“
Sometimes, Nathaniel, friends can be like nice boots on a drowning man.
”
”
Gori Suture (Asphyxia -- A Smut Saga, Vol. 1)
“
The time that I spend in hospital is so dauntingly real that it makes my activities and emotions outside of working hours feel childish and superficial, like a sitcom, a half-hour television comedy.
”
”
Rosamund Kendal (The Karma Suture)
“
Now she’s coming out one of the nostrils, across the septum, and then she’s going to reenter the mouth. There are a variety of ways of closing the mouth,” he adds, and then he begins talking about something called a needle injector. I pose my own mouth to resemble the mouth of someone who is quietly horrified, and this works quite well to close Theo’s mouth. The suturing proceeds in silence. Theo
”
”
Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)
“
My Mother
They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
But they do it annually, or weekly,
Some even do it daily,
Carrying her death around in their heads
And practicing it. She saves them
The trouble of their own;
They can die through her
Without ever making
The decision. My buried mother
Is up-dug for repeat performances.
Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.
The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother’s death, will go home,
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless – a souvenir.
Maybe they’ll buy the video.
Watching someone on TV
Means all they have to do
Is press ‘pause’
If they want to boil a kettle,
While my mother holds her breath on screen
To finish dying after tea.
The filmmakers have collected
The body parts,
They want me to see.
They require dressings to cover the joins
And disguise the prosthetics
In their remake of my mother;
They want to use her poetry
As stitching and sutures
To give it credibility.
They think I should love it –
Having her back again, they think
I should give them my mother’s words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,
Who will walk and talk
And die at will,
And die, and die
And forever be dying.
”
”
Frieda Hughes (The Book of Mirrors)
“
I remember always thinking that life itself doesn’t actually exist, because if no one tells it as a story or turns it into a narrative, life is merely something that happens, nothing more. To understand life, you have to tell it, even if only to yourself. This doesn’t mean that a story can make life comprehensible, because there are always gaps in any narrative, whatever sutures or remedies you might try to apply. That is why a narrative only restores life in fragmentary form.
”
”
Enrique Vila-Matas (Vampire in Love)
“
I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others' paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing was telling a story and that story was your life.
A thread now most often means a line of conversation via e-mail or other electronic means, but thread must have been an even more compelling metaphor when most people witnessed or did the women's work that is spinning. It is a mesmerizing art, the spindle revolving below the strong thread that the fingers twist out of the mass of fiber held on an arm or a distaff. The gesture turns the cloudy mass of fiber into lines with which the world can be tied together. Likewise the spinning wheel turns, cyclical time revolving to draw out the linear time of a thread. The verb to spin first meant just this act of making, then evolved to mean anything turning rapidly, and then it came to mean telling a tale.
Strands a few inches long twine together into a thread or yarn that can go forever, like words becoming stories. The fairy-tale heroines spin cobwebs, straw, nettles into whatever is necessary to survive. Scheherazade forestalls her death by telling a story that is like a thread that cannot be cut; she keeps spinning and spinning, incorporating new fragments, characters, incidents, into her unbroken, unbreakable narrative thread. Penelope at the other end of the treasury of stories prevents her wedding to any one of her suitors by unweaving at night what she weaves by day on her father-in-law's funeral garment. By spinning, weaving, and unraveling, these women master time itself, and though master is a masculine word, this mastery is feminine.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit
“
Does she ‘go crazy’? No, not at all: after a few moments of bewildered fugue, Heather Lelache accepts the ‘new’ world as the ‘true’ world, editing out the point of suture. This strategy – of accepting the incommensurable and the senseless without question – has always been the exemplary technique of sanity as such, but it has a special role to play in late capitalism, that ‘motley painting of everything that ever was’, whose dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as its production and disposal of commodities.
”
”
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
“
That the future is unknowable is, for some, God’s means of suturing us in, or to, the present moment. For others, it is the mark of a malevolence, a sure sign that our entire existence here is best understood as a sort of joke or mistake.
For me, it is neither. It is simply the way it is. Whether this accident be happy or unhappy is probably more a matter of mood than anything else; the difficulty is that “our moods do not believe in each other” (Emerson). One can wander about the landscape looking for clues, amassing evidence, but even the highest pile never seems to decide the case.
”
”
Maggie Nelson (Bluets)
“
I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster. Just as the words “dyke”, “fag”, “queer”, “slut”, and “whore” have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like “creature”, “monster”, and “unnaturaI” need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. [...] Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.
”
”
Susan Stryker (My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage)
“
Spectators learn to assign every shot a cause internal to the film's narrative. Jean-Pierre Oudart used the word suture to describe how fillms thus produce the impression of contiguous space by soliciting the viewer's unconscious cooperation. The classical Hollywood film follows the model of Velázquez's Las Meninas, a painting that envelops the space in which we viewers stand, yet erases us in the process.
In the classical Hollywood cinema, editing moves far too quickly and efficiently to let us savor this paradox. It solicits, even exploits, our psychic labor in knitting the film together and sells us back that labor as entertainment.
”
”
Mal Ahern
“
If enough individuals are full of despair and anger in their hearts, there will be violence in the streets. If enough individuals are full of greed and fear in their hearts, there will be racism and oppression in society. You can't remove the external social symptoms without treating the corresponding internal personal diseases...Pope Francis draws our attention to the 'invisible thread' of the market, which he describes as 'the mentality of profit at any price, with no concern for social exclusion or the destruction of nature.' This mentality generates inequality, which in turn generates 'a violence which no police, military, or intelligence resources can control'...changed individuals cross racial, religious, ethnic, class or political boundaries to build friendships. These friendship work like sutures, healing wounds in the social fabric. They 'humanize the other,' making it harder for groups to stereotype or scapegoat. They create little zones where the beloved community is manifest...They help people envision the common good--a situation where all are safe, free, and able to thrive. As my friend Shane Claiborne says, our problem isn't that rich people don't care about poor people; it's that all too often, rich people don't know any poor people. Knowing one another makes interpersonal change and reconciliation possible. (p. 167-168)
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”
Brian D. McLaren (The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World's Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian)
“
Plato’s term for soul-suture: “the fastening of heaven.” Rumi’s term: “the cord of causation.” Plotinus’s: “our tutelary spirit, not bound up with our nature, not the agent in our action, belonging to us as belonging to our soul, as the power which consummates the chosen life.” And American poets have discovered this magic, too! Denise Levertov speaks of a thread, finer than spider’s silk, that pulls at her, keeps her company, guides her. William Stafford speaks of a thread we can follow as it pierces things that change, yet itself never changes. That these spirit threads, as Plotinus says, aren’t ours, that they’re the soul’s own unbreakable extensions, is why they have the
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David James Duncan (Sun House)
“
If Marzulli's anatomical observation of the elongated skulls of the Paracas were right in that they are completely devoid of a sagittal suture (i.e., Scaphocephaly), then such a desired physically induced mutation could be perceived as a medical procedure aimed at increasing the transfer of perceptual, sensory, motor and cognitive information between the two hemispheres; this was possibly done to prevent each hemisphere from processing information outside the awareness of the other. In essence, this meant that the operation was intended to prevent the brain from producing and developing any margin of a double consciousness as normal humans are equipped with; culminating thereby in some form of a unified consciousness.
”
”
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
“
When facing a problem
The First Step is stopping
Stop letting where you are at
Be the mindset that determines how far you can get
Yeah, you’ve been cut plus stabbed in the back
But use a suture
Fix your eyes on a time in the future
Wrap your hands round the straps of your boots
Or your bow aimed by you
A well-trained archer after success a target much larger
You are not a problem
You are THEE
Problem Solver
The Second Step
Remember where you were
Experience has knit the sack, your quiver
So set a goal, get your arrow, let it go
And when you grow
Tell them, Oh . . . I understand
Your story
Might be the sword in her hand
Tell him, You are me.
Tell of how you used to be
the epitome of POV-erty
But now you know the best way out undoubtedly is PO-etry
”
”
T.L. Sanders (kNew: The Poetic Screenplay)
“
Doctor controlled his anger. “Tom,” he said, “Tom, boy. Pull yourself together. Go back and lay cold cloths—cold as you can get them. I don’t suppose you have any ice. Well, keep changing the cloths. I’ll be out as fast as I can. Do you hear me? Tom, do you hear me?” He hung the receiver up and dressed. In angry weariness he opened the wall cabinet and collected scalpels and clamps, sponges and tubes of sutures, to put in his bag. He shook his gasoline pressure lantern to make sure it was full and arranged ether can and mask beside it on his bureau. His wife in boudoir cap and nightgown looked in. Dr. Tilson said, “I’m walking over to the garage. Call Will Hamilton. Tell him I want him to drive me to his father’s place. If he argues tell him his sister is—dying.
”
”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
“
Lady St. Vincent is too generous." The piles of crisp frothy undergarments looked so pristine, it was likely they had never been worn. There was even a corset, its white laces as neat as surgical sutures.
"Oh, she has many, many dresses," Betty confided, handing Amelia a pair of folded drawers and a chemise. "Lord St. Vincent sees to it that his wife is dressed like a queen. I'll tell thee summat: if she wanted the moon for her looking glass, he'd find a way to pull it down for her."
"How do you know so much about them?" Amelia asked, hooking the front of the corset while Betty moved behind her to pull the laces.
"I'm Lady St. Vincent's maid. I travel with her wherever she goes. She bid me to attend thee and the other Miss Hathaways- 'they need special care,' she said, 'after what they've endured.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Mine Till Midnight (The Hathaways, #1))
“
Again I heard the cry, and I approached, circling the tree until I was looking at it from the opposite side. From gnarled roots to blasted top, the large trunk was split open, a dark wound where a bolt of lightning had rent it apart and fire had burned its center out, leaving it hollow. A mesh of thick vines grew upward from the base, crawling along the withered trunk, sutures trying to close the gaping wound where the sides lay back like flaps of charred flesh. The wind streamed through the gap, tugging the cuffs of my wet pants, brushing at the grass, tearing at the leaves of the new growth around the tree. Then I heard the cry again, and once more I froze, for I discovered the thing that voiced it, almost hidden behind the moving greenery.
I was looking at a human skull, and it was from behind the parted jaws that the screams came.
”
”
Thomas Tryon (Harvest Home)
“
When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run--and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do--our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can't eat: there's always something. We want these choices. But that doesn't mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Fix Something. Is there any way out of this?
”
”
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
“
We receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity, of our passive impressionism, of our helplessness before suggestion. In no period has the role of the parents loomed as immense, because we have recognized the determinism, but at the same time an exaggeration in the size of the Enormous Parent does not need to be permanent and irretrievable. The time has come when, having completed the scientific study of the importance of parents, we now must re-establish our power to revoke their imprint, to reverse our patterns, to kill our fatal downward tendencies. We do not remain smaller in suture than our parents. Nature had intended them to shrink progressively in our eyes to human proportions while we reach for our own maturity. Their fallibilities, their errors, their weaknesses were intended to develop our own capacity for parenthood. We were to discover their human weakness not to overwhelm or humiliate them, but to realize the difficulty of their task and awaken our own human protectiveness toward their failures or a respect for their partial achievement. But to place all responsibilities upon them is wrong too. If they gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength. We cannot forever await from them the sanction to mature, to impose on them our own truths, to resist or perhaps defeat them in our necessity to gain strength.
We cannot always place responsibility outside of ourselves, on parents, nations, the world, society, race, religion. Long ago it was the gods. If we accepted a part of this responsibility we would simultaneously discover our strength. A handicap is not permanent. We are permitted all the fluctuations, metamorphoses which we all so well understand in our scientific studies of psychology.
Character has ceased to be a mystery and we can no longer refuse our responsibility with the excuse that this is an unformed, chaotic, eyeless, unpredictable force which drives, tosses, breaks us at will.
”
”
Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5: 1947-1955)
“
We should get some vitamin E on that,” I said, eyeing the raised, red lines that looked recently sutured. He grumbled something about real men not needing vitamin E.
“That’s right,” I said. “They just grab their nut sacks and will themselves back to health. Let me know how that turns out for you.
”
”
Kate Canterbary (The Cornerstone (The Walshes, #4))
“
Although routines and standards are clearly related, they are not identical. As Kindleberger (1983) pointed out, standards are public goods; they reflect interpersonally shared knowledge. We might even say that a standard is a certain kind of “public” routine that helps to coordinate private (individual or intraorganizational) routines. But routines are not only about coordination. As we saw, routines embody potentially useful—we might even say productive—knowledge. In the terminology of Ryle (1949), they reflect “knowledge how.” In some cases, such useful knowledge can be knowledge about how to transact, the possession of which thus reduces transaction costs. My internalized knowledge that I always ought to keep to the right (not the left) as another car approaches might be an example, at least if we construe the interaction between oncoming drivers metaphorically as a transaction. But the skillful exercise of a particular technique for suturing an incision would also be a routine, and not one obviously involving the reduction of transaction costs. Useful knowledge applied to problems of transacting is a special case of a more general phenomenon. As Winter (1988) has suggested, one needs to have economic capabilities (an effective repertoire of routines) in order to be able to transact as well as to be able to produce.6 Like standards, routines can be both enabling and constraining. The possession of an effective repertoire of routines would be crucial to the successful production of product A; but possessing that repertoire might also inhibit a transition to the production of product B. Routines are generally as hard to unlearn as to learn, which may give the advantage in situations of radical innovation to those who have never learned the routines in the first place.7 This is no doubt what Schumpeter (1934) had in mind when he wrote that “new combinations are, as a rule, embodied, as it were, in new firms which generally do not arise out of the old ones but start producing beside them;... in general it is not the
”
”
Raghu Garud (Path Dependence and Creation (Organization and Management Series))
“
You live here in Copper Creek, Miss Ashford?” She dipped a fresh cloth in the water and washed the bullet wound in the patient’s shoulder as best she could. “I do now. We arrived today.” She paused and straightened, the muscles in her back in spasms from bending over the table, and from too much riding on trains and coaches and wagons. She thought of Janie waiting at home, watching for her, and hoped she wasn’t worrying. Robert’s only concern would be that she’d left him overlong with people he didn’t know. He hated making chitchat. She just hoped he wasn’t acting sullen and stone-faced with Vince, Janie, and Emma, like he so often did with her. Hearing a clock ticking somewhere behind her, she rethreaded the needle and focused again on her task. Suturing a man was different from suturing a horse, and very definitely different from sewing saddles. Yet something about the repetition of the act felt similar, which made her wonder if she was doing it right. “We?” Finishing the third suture in the man’s shoulder, she peered up at Caradon, the needle poised between her right thumb and forefinger. “I beg your pardon?” “You said ‘we arrived today.’” Not wanting to talk, she tied off a fourth suture, and a fifth, aware of him watching her. “My brother and I.” “Where did you move from?” She raised her head to find him leaning close, their faces inches apart. “If you don’t mind, Marshal Caradon, could we . . . not talk right now?” The tanned lines at the corners of his eyes tightened ever so slightly. “Not much on that, are you, ma’am? Talking, I mean.” Though his expression denied it, she heard a smile in his voice, yet she held back from responding to it. Outwardly anyway. Someone like Wyatt Caradon was the last person she, or Robert, needed in their lives right now. “I don’t mind talking, Marshal. When I’m not exhausted, famished, and stitching up a gunshot wound.” Catching his grin before she looked away, she finished suturing and bandaging the wound.
”
”
Tamera Alexander (The Inheritance)
“
Somewhere in the world there must be a cult of divination centered on the interpretation of cranial sutures, but he couldn’t recall any from his Cultural Anthro classes. Papua New Guinea maybe. They were big into cranial curation there.
”
”
Scott Nicolay (Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed)
“
Good. Real Good. Now, I’m gonna walk past y’all and go speak with the Sharmas. If I hear one noise out of him,” she pointed over her shoulder at me, “that isn’t a chortle of glee, it will be Sutures-In-My-Taint time for the whole bunch of ya.
”
”
James Crawford (Blood Soaked and Invaded (Blood Soaked #2))
“
I sutured split infinitives and hoisted dangling modifiers and wore out the seam of my best flannel skirt.
”
”
Amor Towles
“
It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you give yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer’s conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo’s operating table.
”
”
John Banville (The Untouchable)
“
I couldn’t remember if Michigan was famous for steak or if that was Kansas. Geography was never my strong suit.” “Don’t ask me. If it isn’t in one of the six boroughs, I don’t know much about it. Sure, I’d like to go to Hawaii, the Bahamas, maybe Guadalupe, but aside from that, the only place I want to be is New York.” “Gina, there are only five boroughs—” “You forgot Florida. You’ve heard of the South Bronx; Florida is the South Manhattan. Don’t you know anything?” Rosalie cut into the perfect steak—so rare, you could save it with sutures—and took a bite, nearly groaning in ecstasy. She’d never known how good it could feel to be able to taste food again. A trickle of blood dripped onto her chin, and she laughed.
”
”
Robin Kaye (Romeo, Romeo (Domestic Gods, #1))
“
if you accept that at least three continents rubbed together with enormous force for a period of at least 150 million years. There ought to be a suture, a layer of scar tissue, stretching up the eastern seaboard of the United States. There isn't.
”
”
Anonymous
“
Manuscripts - at least for Muslims who understand the subject - are to be read as books whose contents are to be known and understood, for that is why they were written, and not to be regarded as enigmatic specimens for critical textual and philological exercises. To them what is in the manuscripts is more important than what is on them, and so they say: Al-'ilmu fi'l-sudur la fi'l-sutur.
”
”
Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas (Comments on the Re-Examination of Al-Raniri's Hujjatu'l-Siddiq: A Refutation)
“
They come giving, not taking. They create community. They believe in justice. They seek peace. How much more simple can that get for our muddle-brained minions who create insane immigration policies? Refugees enrich, not deplete, they imagine and create places, not impose inglorious eyesores on our landscapes, they welcome not spurn, they feed not starve, they work not cheat, they earn not take. They come to repair our democracy, to lay the patient on the table and carefully apply the sutures, cut out the cancer of cynicism and sew up the wound, disinfect and pray over the wound, attend to the patient, feed it, lift its head and give it water and sing to it and keep it warm and safe, even as the patient screams and swings wildly at them with knives and guns, drags them away in maddened fits of rage, and locks them in dark dungeons or in cages and starves and beats them and even rapes them, they wait patiently, hoping for a time when the patient tires and returns to its sanity.
”
”
Jimmy Santiago Baca (When I Walk Through That Door, I Am: An Immigrant Mother's Quest)
“
the use of electrodes at skull sutures by a newly developed means which enabled contact to be made directly with the gray cells, without even the necessity of shaving a patch of skull.
”
”
Isaac Asimov (Second Foundation (Foundation, #3))
“
Eve separated from Adam’s rib is the original story of creation that god himself is substance of creation. Then the symbol is reversed with Jesus.
”
”
Syed Buali Gillani
“
Each no-dig hāngi we make in the oven with cabbage leaves sutures a different part of me back together. Every time we collect and cook something together with love and joy makes up for every time I ate until I was sick. We take a small moment each day to stand in my parents’ garden in the sun. To nourish ourselves, we harvest the earth and the beings that spring from it. All our small attempts to care for ourselves and each other wash away some of the shadowy figures that have followed us around for so long.
I have a knife, a basket, and two legs. He kai kei aku ringa.
”
”
Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall (Tauhou)
“
Aggressively yelling at a boy is as effective as attempting to stitch up a wound with a needle and no suture. Discipline without love is ineffectual.
”
”
Jason Wilson
“
What this means is that the highest goal of spiritual immortality can only be reached through the living vehicle of the human body and its powerful vitality. But once the adept has arrived at this goal, he may only realize the ultimate truth by abandoning the body for his spiritual 'flight into space'. A good analogy here is a chicken embryo growing inside its eggshell. If the shell breaks before incubation is complete, there is no life; similarly, if an adept's body 'breaks' and dies before he has completed 'incubation' of his spirit-body, he loses his chance of spiritual immortality after death. When the inner embryo in a chicken egg is fully developed, however, it must crack open the shell and discard it in order to live. Similarly, once the adept has fully developed his spirit-body, he must abandon the flesh sooner or later in order to let his spirit roam freely in the cosmos. This exit occurs through an actual crack that develops in the suture on the crown of the skull in such adepts. Only newborn babies and the most advanced adepts have such loose sutures in their skulls. p393
”
”
Daniel Reid (The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity: A Modern Practical Guide to the Ancient Way)
“
On the west coast of the Isle of Man, near the hamlet of Niarbyl, the cliffs of a small cove have running diagonally across them a thin, greyish-white seam of rock. It is visible for only a hundred metres or so before it disappears into the waters of the Irish Sea but it is a memorial to the making of Scotland. Known as the Iapetus Suture, it marks the precise place where the vast continents of Laurentia and Avalonia collided, having welded the four terranes together.
”
”
Alistair Moffat (Scotland: A History from Earliest Times)
“
Irreversibility orients us towards the past, demanding engagement that is radically different from the approaches of mastery, containment or appropriation. It orients us towards the present, calling for the belief (and love) of the testimonial voice and for the capitulation vis-à-vis the proximate presence of “wounded” and “sutured” Other. And it orients us towards the future, in an insistent reminder that the catastrophic unfolding (in its current possibility and actuality) will not be reversed.
”
”
Magdalena Zolkos (Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész)
“
I got in the car and headed home, wondering if I would ever tell Kay that I didn't have a woman because sex tasted like blood and resin and suture scrub to me.
”
”
James Ellroy (The Black Dahlia (L.A. Quartet, #1))
“
There is a division within feminism that is not spoken of but that has remained seething beneath the surface for years. It is the division between the women who write and speak feminism and the women who live it, the women who have voice versus the women who have experience, the ones who make the theories and policies and the ones who bear scars and sutures from the fight.
”
”
Rafia Zakaria (Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption)
“
Bandages and Supplies 50 assorted-size adhesive bandages 1 large trauma dressing 20 sterile dressings, 4x4 inch 20 sterile dressings, 3x3 inch 20 sterile dressings, 2x2 inch 1 roll of waterproof adhesive tape (10 yards x 1 inch) 2 rolls self-adhesive wrap, 1/2 inch 2 rolls self-adhesive wrap, 1 inch 2 rolls self-adhesive wrap, 2 inch » 1 elastic bandage, 3 inch » 1 elastic bandage, 4 inch » 2 triangular cloth bandages » 10 butterfly bandages » 2 eye pads Medications 2 to 4 blood-clotting agents 10 antibiotic ointment packets (approximately 1 gram) 1 tube of hydrocortisone ointment 1 tube of antibiotic ointment 1 tube of burn cream 1 bottle of eye wash 1 bottle of antacid 1 bottle syrup of ipecac (for poisoning) 1 bottle of activated charcoal (for poisoning) 25 antiseptic wipe packets 2 bottles of aspirin or other pain reliever (100 count) 2 to 4 large instant cold compresses 2 to 4 small instant cold packs 1 tube of instant glucose (for diabetics) Equipment 10 pairs of large latex or nonlatex gloves 1 space blanket or rescue blanket 1 pair of chemical goggles 10 N95 dust/mist respirators or medical masks 1 oral thermometer (nonmercury/nonglass) 1 pair of splinter forceps 1 pair of medical scissors 1 magnifying glass 2 large SAM Splints (optional) 1 tourniquet Assorted safety pins Optional Items If Trained to Use 1 CPR mask 1 bag valve mask 1 adjustable cervical spine collar 1 blood pressure cuff and stethoscope or blood pressure device 1 set of disposable oral airways 1 oxygen tank with regulator and non-rebreather mask Suturing kit and sutures Surgical or super glue If you have advanced training, such items as a suturing kit, IV setup, and medical instruments may be added.
”
”
James C. Jones (Total Survival: How to Organize Your Life, Home, Vehicle, and Family for Natural Disasters, Civil Unrest, Financial Meltdowns, Medical Epidemics, and Political Upheaval)
“
Whatever his true cure rate, Sim's silver sutures did help to end a real medical tragedy for many women, and some excuse the abuse of enslaved women on this basis. This essentially utilitarian argument presents an ethical balance sheet, with the savage medical abuse of captive women on one hand and countless women saved from painful invalidism on the other. However, such an argument ignores the ethical concept of social justice, and these experiments violated this essential value because the suffering and the benefits have been distributed in an unfair way, leading to distributive injustice.
”
”
Harriet A. Washington (Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present)
“
contained a suture kit, more water purification tablets, Russian aspirin, blood-clotting gauze, an Israeli-style wrap bandage, tweezers, six Russian-style Band-Aids of varying sizes, two antibacterial wipes, a small tube of antiseptic ointment, and an electrolyte drink mix. The fourth and final pouch in the ditch kit was emblazoned with words Harvath didn’t know. Opening it up, he looked inside. As soon as he saw the signal mirror, he knew exactly what this bag was—a SERE kit. In addition to the mirror, there was a compass, a whistle, more stormproof matches, more water purification tablets, a small notebook and pen, a silk scarf printed with panels containing survival instructions, more hextabs, a flint and striker, a packet of sunscreen, and some mosquito wipes. Opening the flare gun case, he examined its contents. In keeping with similar setups from the Soviet days, the kit included the pistol itself and four flares, beneath which was a conversion tube. When inserted into the barrel, it allowed for firing of .45 or .410 ammunition. Two cardboard boxes with five rounds of each
”
”
Brad Thor (Backlash (Scot Harvath, #18))
“
Of the six million species on the planet, only man makes language. Words. What's more--in evidence of the Divine--we string those symbols together and then write them down, where they take on a life of their own and breathe outside of us. Story is the bandage of the broken. Sutures of the shattered. The tapestry upon which we write our lives. Upon which we lay the bodies of our dying and the about-to-come-to-life. And if it's honest, true, hind nothing, revealing all, then it is a raging river and those who ride it find they have something to give--that they are not yet empty.
”
”
Charles Martin (Unwritten)
“
My eyes tried to make tears but they'd gone dry hours ago. I lay back on the couch, poured the rest of the tequila into my glass, and slipped a DVD into the TV. It was a plastic surgery reality show, hours of it, and I watched as people were transformed, pulled apart, emptied, and re-stitched. Did they wake up feeling better? Did they look in the mirror and finally know themselves? I wondered. I fell asleep as yellow fat was weighed and dark sutures were drawn through the eye of an open wound.
”
”
Megan Baxter (Farm Girl: A Memoir)
“
My crazy little girl, now that you have transcended the threshold of sanity and sliced up this beautiful face of yours, do not ever go back to the meadow of reason and common sense. What is even worse than slicing up your face without remorse is the remorse that follows. In that case, you'll finally suffer and suffer for nothing. So be true to yourself, remain as crazy as you have been once the sutures are removed, promise?' I promised.
”
”
Elif Shafak (The Flea Palace)
“
Did you learn how to suture when you were a Navy SEAL?
”
”
Ashley N. Rostek (Free Me (WITSEC, #4))
“
A wonderfully effective deterrent is Vick’s VapoRub. Veterinarians tell me that cats hate the smell and will almost always ignore the stitches if you spread a tiny amount on each side (not on top) of the suture line.
”
”
Amy Shojai (Complete Kitten Care)
“
They skirted the party, took side stairs down. Lynn’s Packard in the watch commander’s space, a summons stuck to the windshield. Ed tore it up, checked the back seat. Bud White. Braces on his legs, his head shaved and sutured. No splints on his hands—they looked strong. A wired-up mouth that made him look goofy. Lynn stood a few feet away. White tried to smile, grimaced. Ed said, “I swear to you I’ll get Dudley. I swear to you I’ll do it.” White grabbed his hands, squeezed until they both winced. Ed said, “Thanks for the push.” A smile, a laugh—Bud forced them through wires. Ed touched his face. “You were my redemption.” Party noise upstairs—Dudley Smith laughing. Lynn said, “We should go now.” “Was I ever in the running?” “Some men get the world, some men get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona. You’re in with the former, but my God I don’t envy you the blood on your conscience.” Ed kissed her cheek. Lynn got in the car, rolled up the windows. Bud pressed his hands to the glass. Ed touched his side, palms half the man’s size. The car moved—Ed ran with it, hands against hands. A turn into traffic, a goodbye toot on the horn. Gold stars. Alone with his dead.
”
”
James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential (L. A. Quartet #3))
“
The leaf-shaped boats bore unbelievable wares beneath his eyes--extravagant fruits and vegetables/, flowers of excessive colors, a thousand kind of fish, sometimes gold trinkets made by the northern mountain tribes, baroque pearls from the southern sea tribes, cloth of incredible patterns, and of course, the men and women, brown as aged wood, skin varnished by the sun, dark eyes that smoldered, he and all for not seeing potential locked in their environment of no winter; no drought; he cursed them for being existential, so immersed in the pleasure of living in this moment and this moment alone, this drift of boats down the current of a canal whose clear waters spoke of mountain rains, while he, Hans, old soul from Europe, had to think of the suture and sweat out all the possibilities of disaster before it even struck.
”
”
Ninotchka Rosca (State of War)
“
Forgiveness is a kind of time travel, only better, because it sutures the wounds of the past with the wisdom of the present in the same moment as it promises a better future."
The lighthouse witches by C.J.COOK
”
”
C.J.COOKE
“
Digby picks up the sketch Elsie left behind. At first he thinks she’s drawn a leper’s hand. But those square nails, the puffy, discolored skin on the back, the suture marks—it’s his hand. He stares in horrified fascination. The stiff, leaden, and bony appendage grasping a charcoal stick is the inverse of the hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. The gift Elsie possesses is breathtaking. The young artist shows no revulsion, no recoiling from the subject—quite the opposite. With devastating accuracy and without judgment she has rendered Digby’s hand the way it appears, and accepted it for what it is. He has yet to.
”
”
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
“
I hope the scalpel is kind to you. I hope your sutures heal clean. You deserve that much; we all do.
”
”
Andrew Joseph White, The Spirit Bares Its Teeth