The Queen Of Hearts Quotes
"You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns."
"In my opinion, meetings are the enemy of progress."
"It’s the innumerable smaller choices that snowball into larger vectors."
"When the shit really rains down, who needs a ballerina?"
"You know you have a friendship more precious than rubies when the friend is willing to scrub your bathroom after the detonation of a gastrointestinal bomb."
"Doctors were beloved. They zipped around learning everyone’s secrets, delivering babies, soothing the sick, showing up in the nick of time to save the day."
"The only way to atone was to forgo all appealing food in favor of vile green smoothies and then exercise as if I were afflicted with ’roid rage."
"Even the worst tarantula on the planet has his moments."
"He had all these spreadsheets and projections for our household expenses and had calculated basically down to the minute when we would reach a level of financial comfort sufficient for him to start blowing money on things like country clubs or luxury cars."
"You wouldn’t be the same person without your friend as your external hard drive."
"It was one thing to know on an intellectual level that I’d have to see Nick again, and another to encounter him when I wasn’t expecting it."
"I’ve had to build a mental fortress, a no-fly zone where none of it can get in."
"There was some good information about the health benefits of caffeine—decent research about decreases in the incidence of Parkinson’s and some forms of cancer and heart disease, and even things like headache reduction."
"That’s the male default mode," he answered, triumphantly holding aloft a small rectangle of purple plastic.
"Usually, I responded to adversity by manning up: I stayed calm, I calculated the most advantageous response to a situation, and I carried it out with maximum efficiency."
"People who respond irrationally throw me off."
"In addition to his surgical practice, Dr. Xenokostas is an ardent skier, golfer, and macramé artist."
"Sometimes, at night, I actually used to think about them getting hurt in a car wreck."
"Unspeakable fears do lunge out of our imaginations into reality, and it doesn’t matter who has gone down before you."
"You could bring trauma upon yourself, certainly, but you couldn’t always protect yourself from it."
"No amount of money can insulate you from the capricious whims of the trauma gods: they fling their lightning bolts at the rich and poor alike."
"Men in general were difficult to interpret, as every woman since the dawn of time will attest."
"I understood why, of course. Some grief blots out the world."
"I had made the horrific mistake of waking her before bringing in all the grocery stuff, so I was forced to carry her to and from the car multiple times as I brought in all the bags."
"I don’t make a habit of hurtling into bed with strange surgeons. Or anybody at work. Or anybody, actually."
"You’re an intriguing girl—you know that? You are hard to intimidate, and you’re funny."
"I kind of miss having a med student around; there’s nobody here to cater to my whims."
"That was revolting. I’m contacting an attorney."
"You’re going to supervise the washout, right?"
"We are controlling future trauma populations."
"Ah, c'mon, Z. You got me all excited about the date night, and I want to celebrate your last day on the rotation."
"Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies."
"Maybe none of us can be truly gifted at medicine until we’ve grasped the consequences of what we do."
"Calm parenting. You were supposed to acknowledge their feelings, thus communicating that you accept their personhood. At the same time, you should allow zero tolerance for rudeness, while exhibiting an authoritative but calm demeanor so as not to escalate the battle."
"I hear you that this is not your favorite breakfast," I said quietly but firmly. "However, this is what I am serving, and there will be no other food given."
"Delaney, we do not throw food," I said. "Ever. You need to help wipe this up, and then you will get a new bowl from the drawer."
"Hmmm. So much for calm parenting. Maybe I could write a book called Volcanic Parenting: The Explosive Method of Intermittent Control. It would probably be a best seller."
"I’m functioning," she said, her gaze landing on the boys after sweeping past Delaney. "I guess it’s good to be out of the house."
"Every doctor has a colleague who’s been sued. Or maybe they’ve been sued themselves. It lurks over everyone like a ten-foot-tall grizzly, waiting for you to stumble, poised to sink its fangs into your helplessly exposed neck."
"The heart, a simple mechanical pump, taking in depleted blood and whooshing out rich, oxygenated red cells to all the nooks and crannies of the human form, but the physics underlying the pump are truly majestic."
"Mom," she puffed, "I am done with being human. I need you to buy me a tail."
"Babies are helpless but brilliant parasites who have survived the millennia by enslaving adults."
"Every time Zadie held a baby, her own or not, she began to emit authentic waves of maternal warmth and love."
"Now I felt it: the helpless, searing wash of love for my baby that meant I’d do anything for him."
"This is what I’d say to Boyd and Betsy, if I could: I understand what you lost."
"Do not rejoice over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will arise; though I sit in darkness, the LORD is my light."
"People should not have to deal with the horror of death when they are in their twenties."
"I was self-reliant! The sort of person who could find solace in her own company when things were bad!"
"The now-useless possessions outlasting the human occupants."
"Sudden realization that life as you know it has come to an end."
"How much pain did it take to decide ending your life was the better option?"
"The sort of person who could find solace in her own company when things were bad."
"Trauma that finally unglued me was all self-generated."
"I watched people break apart and I was fine. I watched people die and I was fine."
"Sometime around ten thirty p.m. on the last day of the last month, premodern humans joined the party."
"Everything you take for granted was foreign to me."
"There is no more debilitating emotion than shame. Even grief has a redeeming clarity and purity to it: you know there is a terrible beauty in loving something so much that its loss nearly ends you."
"Your past is set, but your future is wide open."
"The past is never really gone. It’s one long chain linking the present and also the future, and sometimes it doubles back on itself, exposing the things you thought were buried."
"The problem was my face: it doesn’t reflect my feelings."
"Bad shit happens sometimes, despite our best efforts; what’s the point in punishing you when you did what you thought was right?"
"It’s one thing to contemplate the infinite possibilities you didn’t choose, but quite another to have had the choice wrested away without your knowledge."
"Anything that's truly real can stand up to scrutiny."
"Insightful even at the end of his life, Graham had selected that volume as our place to hide letters to each other."
"Only the truly psychopathic among us lack the voice of conscience perched on our shoulders, whispering into our ears the words we don't want to hear as we do what we shouldn't."
"If intensity could kill, I would not have survived our first kiss."
"I love my other friends, but they all fit into a unidimensional slot in my life. You’re the only person who connects all the dots."
"Everyone needs one person who gets all their quirks and their history."
"I felt like I’d been inhaling fire for days, and then, out of nowhere, the soot and the smoke and the pain were gone, and I was breathing clean air again."