Henry Marsh Quotes

#1. My readiness to admit to my fallibility is perhaps rather English, but I hope that the problems I describe will be familiar to doctors and patients everywhere.

Henry Marsh

#2. But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one.

Henry Marsh

#3. Next morning I showed her brain scan to the juniors at

Henry Marsh

#4. Some of my operations are great triumphs and tremendous. But they're only triumphs because there are also disasters

Henry Marsh

#5. There are few places in England where you can get so much wildness and desolation of sea and sandhills, wood, green marsh and grey saltings as at Wells in Norfolk.

William Henry Hudson

#6. The operating is the easy part, you know,' he said. 'By my age you realize that the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making.

Henry Marsh

#7. The most important question of the 21st century is not what or how much, it is 'How?' How do you propose to turn your good ideas into positive changes in other people's lives? You must be the 'how generation.'

William J. Clinton

#8. Anxiety might be contagious, but confidence is also contagious

Henry Marsh

#9. How are you feeling?' I asked. 'Fine,' he replied with a tired smile. 'Well done!' I replied, as I think patients need to be congratulated for their surviving just as much as the surgeons should be congratulated for doing their job well. 'It's

Henry Marsh

#10. When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.

Hilaire Belloc

#11. When I tell a patient that I think I should do their operation under local anaesthetic they usually look a little shocked. In fact the brain cannot itself feel pain since pain is a phenomenon produced within the brain.

Henry Marsh

#12. CSF used to be called "gin-clear" when there was no blood or infection in it,' I say to Jeff. 'But probably we're now supposed to use alcohol-free terminology.' I

Henry Marsh

#13. The idea that my sucker is moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly, is simply too strange to understand.

Henry Marsh

#14. Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.

Henry Marsh

#15. And why the hell was I thinking this crap while Sam was in the other room with a heart that would never be unwounded again? Maybe her heart would never heal. Maybe the hurt would live in her forever. So why in hell was I thinking such stupid and shallow things?

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#16. When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on peoples thoughts and feelings... and if something goes wrong I can destroy that persons character... forever.

Henry Marsh

#17. But I then thought of how the value of my work as a doctor is measured solely in the value of other people's lives, and that included the people in front of me in the check-out queue.

Henry Marsh

#18. Life without hope is hopelessly difficult but at the end hope can so easily make fools of us all.

Henry Marsh

#19. Angor animi - the sense of being in the act of dying, differing from the fear of death or the desire for death.

Henry Marsh

#20. We need the tonic of the wilderness, to wade sometimes in the marsh where the bitten and the meadow hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.

Henry David Thoreau

#21. Don't be a blueprint. Be an original.

Roy Acuff

#22. Balance Sheets are meaningless. Our accounting systems are still based on the assumption that 80% of costs are manual labor.

Peter Drucker

#23. Even from a very early age, I knew I didn't want to miss out on anything life had to offer just because it might be considered dangerous.

Nicole Kidman