12 Quotes by Christine Montross

And so, just as the humanity of our cadavers asserts itself in nail polish and tattoos, the inverse of humanity emerges in the body's utter lack of response to profound wounds.

Thus far we have been able to protect [our children] from the deep and enduring traumas that scar the minds and selves of so many of the patients I see. How — how?—can I make it always so?

During my first semester of medical school, I cannot know how the emotional difficulty of the actions we perform on our cadavers will help us prepare for the agonizing moments we will observe in the lives of the living.

Standing on the edge with my patients — abiding with them — means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.

I feel your body, your sick and scared body. And I feel how it must be different from how it was, and how it is different from mine.

The most alarming moments of anatomy are not the bizarre, the unknown. They are the familiar.

The wisdom of that moment of pure emotion resonates with me still: that the dearest and most enduring moments of our lives are sometimes the quietest ones.

Visions and voices and fear and despair cannot be captured by CT scan or measured in the amplitude of EKG waves. Try as we might, we simply cannot predict which of our patients will kill themselves, which will murder their children, and which will leave the hospital healed, never to return.

Even the most comic moment contains an element of melancholy; even the deepest tragedy harbors a trace of the ironic.