The House Of God Quotes
"There is no need to think. There is time for all things. There is no result, there is only process."
"In internal medicine, there is virtually no need to see patients. Almost all patients are better off unseen."
"Gomer is an acronym: Get Out of My Emergency Room."
"In the middle of all this crap with the Yellow Man, this guy comes into the Emergency Room and I ... I couldn't handle it. I offered him five dollars if he'd go home. He took it and left."
"It's only your second day. Wait till tomorrow, when you and me are on call together."
"Like BUFFING a car. You gotta BUFF the gomers, so that when you TURF them elsewhere, they don't BOUNCE back."
"There is a finite number of House gomers, and since GOMERS DON'T DIE, they rotate through the House several times a year."
"Nothing you learned at the BMS will help you tonight."
"I cry at movies. I've spent twenty-seven Passovers being pampered by the sweetest grandma any Brooklyn boy ever had."
"There is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a number-fourteen needle and a good strong arm."
"You learn on the gomers, so that when some young person comes into the House of God dying, you know what to do, you do good, and you save them."
"I'm not crazy, it's just that I spell out what every other doc feels but most squash down and let eat away at their guts."
"Being cool is the only way of staying alive."
"Every time Chuck had the ball, this kid would foul him, and every shot the kid took, he'd call a foul on Chuck."
"If you don't take a temperature, you can't find a fever."
"The only good admission is a dead admission."
"I can't figure out if I drink because I pee or I pee because I drink."
"If everyone did what feels good, where would we all be?"
"Most of us had learned enough medicine to worry less about saving patients and more about saving ourselves."
"Looking around the room, hearing the simmering jokes and laughter and chatter that from time to time popped its lid and boiled over into a happy roar, I realized how much we'd grown to care about each other."
"We were sharing something big and murderous and grand."
"It's crucial to our understanding of disease."
"Of course they're serious," said Hyper Hooper, "and I'm gonna win it. The Black Crow! Atlantic City, here I come. Salt-water taffy, strolling along the boardwalk."
"I don't think it should be the most posts," I said, sure that the Leggo was joking, "I mean, after all, wouldn't that put a premium on death?"
"I realized that there was nothing I could do to help him except what he'd said was the only thing a doctor could do, be with him."
"Not cure, no. What sustains us is when we find a way to be compassionate, to love."
"The postmortem is important," said Jo. "It's the flower of the science of medicine."
"I didn't get where I am by not taking it. Fire away."
"Winter is coming and you are undoubtedly becoming accustomed to the hours and the stresses."
"Political news is overwhelming with Nixon a maniac liar and I hope he will get it but good."
"Hope you are your usual self and not working too hard."
"The main source of illness in this world is the doctor's own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can."
"You're like my great-uncle Thaler, my father's father's brother."
"After all these years, to see this, is a wonderful thing."
"You can take the boy out of South Philadelphia, but you can never take South Philadelphia out of the boy."
"The secret is to decathect. Withdraw your libidinal investment in what you're doing."
"If only I had the hearts and minds of the Watergate Boys."
"To hear you," said Fats, "you'd think no one ever shits in California."
"The Bowel Run of the Stars," said Fats, stars sparkling in his dark eyes.
"Remember," said Fats, finishing, "if you don't do anything, they can't do anything to you."
"Imagine doing a sigmoidoscopy on Groucho Marx?" he'd said, "on Mae West, on Fay Wray, on Kong! On all those stars who think that the colon is filled with cologne."
"Right. Like in the card game: finesse, men, finesse."
"LAW NUMBER ONE: GOMERS DON'T DIE," said Fats.
"The postmortem is the flower—no, the red rose—of medicine."
"This ward is a GI Man's Heaven, and even for a GI man, it's Hell."
"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."
"At one point I'd found him on the phone, red in the face, screaming into the receiver: 'No I haven't been home for a while and I'm not going to tell you where I've been staying. It's none of your business.'"
"You can't go around telling your parents about some nurse sliding around on your face!"
"Before he left us, the Runt asked if we noticed anything different about him. 'I'm not yellow,' he said."
"How's my analysis going? I quit . . . June? I quit her too . . . I know she's nice, Mother, that's why I quit her."
"At midnight I was hunched over a Rose Room Rose, slamming the bed with my fist and hissing, I HATE THIS I HATE THIS over and over again."
"Early in the morning I was awakened by the nurse saying that Harry was in a crazy cardiac rhythm having a chest pain and looking like he was dying."
"Last time I'd seen him, he'd said he was down, that he felt like he used to feel as a kid when his family closed up the Pawley' Island summerhouse for the winter."
"Leaving Chuck in the MICU, I said, 'Hey, you got a great voice. Not a good voice, Chuckie baby, a great, great voice.'"
"You think parents want to hear schoolteachers making fun of their kids? Use your damn head."
"They make me sad, but the way you treat them, making fun of them, like they were animals, is sick. You guys are sick."
"Well, Berry, when we get old and disgusting, who's gonna doctor us? Who's gonna care? Someone's got to do it. We can't just walk away."
"It's hard to be cool in Gomer City that night. The usual horrendous things had gone wrong with gomers."
"Enough is enough. When will you let him die?"
"His only hope now would be the hope of a dream, his only solace, dream-solace, a time when his dream of his voice, of his full life, would comfort him until the daily awakening to the nightmare of his crushed life."
"The smell was that of lingering death: sickly-sour, feverish, sliding away far off on a horizon I could barely see."
"Not for Jo. At each room she riffled her three-by-five cards and rattled off numbers, and then had the nurse hoist the body up to sitting, so she could listen to the chest."
"Despite this, despite the MICU's '4-plussing' him-going all out-he was dying."
"I turned my head away. I never wanted to look into those mute eyes again."
"Quintessence. That was it. The Unit was the quintessence. There, after all the sorting had been done, lay the closest representation, in living terms, of death."
"Forget today today. Total denial. Instant repression."
"There's a helluva lot new to learn in the Unit. I can't afford to think about Potts."
"Amazing. In spite of everything that happens, there's no past."
"He looked good. He was doing extremely well, and I watched him go wistfully, the GOTTA HAVE HEART on his rear end disappearing over the crest."
"You've got only a few choices: kill yourself, go crazy, kill someone else."
"It's three AM Roy. What do you want to tell him?"
"There will be. There always is, with people like him."
"Being with people was all that kept you going this year, Roy. And 'being with' is the essence of psychiatry."
"The shadow of the lost object falls across the ego."
"You don't have to say - Shut up, you fatso, and listen!"
"I know, I know," said Fats quietly. "There'll time to talk about it."
"Get it through your fucking skull!" shouted the Runt at the Leggo.
"Most of us wouldn't know a cure if we found one in a Cracker Jack Box."
"To stay in internal medicine, repression wasn't evil, it was terrific."
"How can we care for patients if nobody cares for us?"
"What we're saying is that the real problem this year hasn't been the gomers, it's been that we didn't have anyone to look up to."
"BUFF and TURF is the essence of the delivery of medical care."
"In the flow of time, the layers of bitterness might begin to peel away, until bitterness itself had become but a faint etching on a glass wall."
"It's not all been that bad having you here this year."