Quotes About Amputees

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.

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.

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.

The goal for many amputees is no longer to reach a 'natural' level of ability but to exceed it, using whatever cutting-edge technology is available. As this new generation sees it, our tools are evolving faster than the human body, so why obey the limits of mere nature?

I have a wonderful assistant. I tell her I need four amputees and a midget, and she finds them.

I hope to continue to open more doors and inspire more people, especially other amputees, to know that they are beautiful, too.

The last blow fell in 1947, when Stalin ordered that the streets of Soviet cities should be cleared of beggars, many of whom were amputees. Maimed veterans who had chosen urban life were herded back into trains, this time bound for the north, and especially for an island on the far side of Lake Ladoga, Valaam. Stalin's unwilling lepers often died in exile.

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.

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.

The goal for many amputees is no longer to reach a 'natural' level of ability but to exceed it, using whatever cutting-edge technology is available. As this new generation sees it, our tools are evolving faster than the human body, so why obey the limits of mere nature?

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.

While 17,000 American combat casualties lost limbs, during the war years 100,000 workers at home became amputees as a result of industrial accidents.