Top 64 Skloot Quotes
#1. The laws are still very unclear. Cells are still taken from people without consent - a lot of people don't realize it.
Rebecca Skloot
#2. Science trumps magical thinking: there was a reason the Incas called their mercury mine 'la mina de los muertos,' the mine of the dead. Building a life and a community upon principles that ignore such realities is doomed to fail.
Floyd Skloot
#3. 'The Art Student's War' is, at its core, a traditional American wartime love story. As such, it is timely and engrossing. By the end, all its principal characters 'have been to Hell and back.'
Floyd Skloot
#4. At 93, so deep in dementia that she didn't remember any details of her life, my mother somehow still knew songs.
Floyd Skloot
#5. Flannery O'Connor's brief life and slim output were nonetheless marked by piercing powers of observation.
Floyd Skloot
#6. If I don't write down a thought - or an image or a line of poetry - the instant it comes to mind, it vanishes, which explains why I have pens and notebooks in my pants and coat pockets, the car, the bicycle basket, on one or two desks in every room including bathrooms and the kitchen.
Floyd Skloot
#7. As in all good training, in the end it doesn't much matter who trained whom; we all got what we wanted.
Rebecca Skloot
#8. I think one of the primary themes in my work is the paradox of memory, at once fundamental to our sense of who we are and yet elusive, ever-changing, fragmentary. One way to look at this is to say that, therefore, we ourselves are elusive, ever-changing and fragmentary to ourselves.
Floyd Skloot
#9. Henrietta's cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,
Rebecca Skloot
#10. Many scientists believed that since patients were treated for free in the public wards, it was fair to use them as research subjects as a form of payment. And as Howard Jones once wrote, Hopkins, with its large indigent black population, had no dearth of clinical material.
Rebecca Skloot
#11. Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.
Floyd Skloot
#12. I keep with me all I know about you deep in my soul, because I am part of you, and you are me.
Rebecca Skloot
#13. In 1964, at the age of 39, Flannery O'Connor died from complications of lupus. She had lived with this autoimmune disease for 14 years, primarily confined to her mother's farm, Andalusia, in Milledgeville, Ga.
Floyd Skloot
#14. For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.
Rebecca Skloot
#15. But I always have thought it was strange, if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors? Don't make no sense. People got rich off my mother without us even knowin about them takin her cells, now we don't get a dime.
Rebecca Skloot
#16. My cerebral cortex, the gray matter that MIT neuroscientist Steven Pinker likens to 'a large sheet of two-dimensional tissue that has been wadded up to fit inside the spherical skull,' is riddled instead of whole.
Floyd Skloot
#17. Some things you got to release. Gary said. The more you hold them in, the worse you get. When you release them, they got to go somewhere else. The Bible says He can carry all that burden.
Rebecca Skloot
#18. When Beverly and I got together in 1992, and I moved to be with her in the little round house she'd built in the middle of 20 acres of woods near Amity, I found myself immersed in a natural setting that I responded to with all my being.
Floyd Skloot
#19. In question-and-answer sessions after a reading or during an interview, I forget the question if I'm giving too long an answer. And at the end, I can't remember any of the questions. The more anxious I am about remembering, the more likely I am to forget.
Floyd Skloot
#20. Eliza Factor's first novel, 'The Mercury Fountain,' explores what happens when a life driven by ideology confronts implacable truths of science and human nature. It also shows how leaders can inflict damage by neglecting the real needs of real people.
Floyd Skloot
#21. I learned about HeLa cells in my first basic biology class, and I just became completely obsessed with them from that point on.
Rebecca Skloot
#22. One of the strangest aspects of living with certain kinds of memory loss is knowing that the forgetting is happening.
Floyd Skloot
#23. I've forgotten what it's like to remember. I've lost the mindless confidence that a moment, an idea, a thought will be there for me later, the bravado of breezing through experience in the certainty that it will become part of my self, part of my story.
Floyd Skloot
#24. My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.
Floyd Skloot
#25. I feel that I'm a poet first. Not only was poetry the first genre in which I wrote, it's the genre that serves as the basis for my practice as a writer.
Floyd Skloot
#26. For an animal that must kill to live, it makes sense for the hunt and the kill to be pleasurable. If you don't kill, you don't eat, and if you don't eat, you die.
Rebecca Skloot
#27. We have to be cautious when we interpret animal behaviors, especially when we want a behavior to mean something in particular. Wanting is a drug, a hallucinogen.
Rebecca Skloot
#28. I used to be able to think. My brain's circuits were all connected, and I had spark, a quickness of mind that let me function well in the world.
Floyd Skloot
#29. The sort of thinking at the time was, 'Well, we're giving you access to medical care which you wouldn't otherwise be able to get, so your payment is that we get to use you in research.'
Rebecca Skloot
#30. Often doctors didn't even tell you what was wrong with you. They just treated you, and sent you home.
Rebecca Skloot
#31. Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.
Floyd Skloot
#32. Like many doctors of his era, TeLinde often used patients from the public wards for research, usually without their knowledge.
Rebecca Skloot
#33. Black patients were treated much later in their disease process. They were often not given the same kind of pain management that white patients would have gotten and they died more often of diseases.
Rebecca Skloot
#34. Neurologists have a host of clinical tests that let them observe what a brain-damaged patient can and cannot do.
Floyd Skloot
#35. But I tell you one thing, I don't want to be immortal if it mean living forever, cause then everybody else just die and get old in front of you while you stay the same, and that's just sad.
Rebecca Skloot
#36. As one of Henrietta's relatives said to me, "If you pretty up how people spoke and change the things they said, that's dishonest. It's taking away their lives, their experiences, and their selves." In
Rebecca Skloot
#37. For scientists, growing cells took so much work that they couldn't get much research done. So the selling of cells was really just for the sake of science, and there weren't a lot of profits.
Rebecca Skloot
#38. Henrietta's were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory.
Rebecca Skloot
#39. In the spring of 1993, I married Beverly and moved to the woods. This is something I could never have imagined myself doing.
Floyd Skloot
#40. Good science is all about following the data as it shows up and letting yourself be proven wrong, and letting everything change while you're working on it - and I think writing is the same way.
Rebecca Skloot
#41. A risk for a poet-novelist is imbalance: The poems can flatten into prose or lose their intensity of focus; the novels can stall amid lofty writing or literary preciousness and ignore the engine of plot and character.
Floyd Skloot
#42. But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins's relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks - a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.
Rebecca Skloot
#44. Only cells that had been transformed by a virus or a genetic mutation had the potential to become immortal.
Rebecca Skloot
#45. Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.
Floyd Skloot
#46. I became demented overnight. Sudden onset is one factor that distinguishes my form of dementia from the more common form associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Floyd Skloot
#47. if our mother cells done so much for medicine, how come her family can't afford to see no doctors?
Rebecca Skloot
#48. She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?
Rebecca Skloot
#49. Dementia resembles delirium in the same way an ultra-marathon resembles a dash across the street. Same basic components, vastly different scale. If you've run delirium's course once or twice in your life, try to imagine a version that never ends.
Floyd Skloot
#50. Like the Bible said,' Gary whispered, 'man brought nothing into this world and he'll carry nothing out. Sometimes we care about stuff too much. We worry when there's nothing to worry about.
Rebecca Skloot
#51. Dementia is, after all, a symptom of organic brain damage. It is a condition, a disorder of the central nervous system, brought about in my case by a viral assault on brain tissue. When the assault wiped out certain intellectual processes, it also affected emotional processes.
Floyd Skloot
#52. In 'A Poetics of Optics,' Equi writes that 'all images bank on alchemy.' This idea captures her fundamental sense of poetry as turning common material into something rare and valuable.
Floyd Skloot
#53. Quoted a local woman, Courtney Speed, who owned a grocery
Rebecca Skloot
#54. Music seems hard-wired into our very being. It moves us, stirs us to action, sets us in motion, sticks in our memories and minds.
Floyd Skloot
#55. When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different.
Rebecca Skloot
#56. A casual observer can testify only to the moment. And what one sees will always be colored by what one longs to see.
Rebecca Skloot
#57. I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
Floyd Skloot
#58. When memories fade, can one ever really return home?
Floyd Skloot
#59. For those who turn to literary biography for salacious details, 'Flannery' will disappoint. It is the biography of someone who had very little chance to live in the conventional sense, to experience events.
Floyd Skloot
#61. Black scientists and technicians, many of them women, used cells from a black woman to help save the lives of millions of Americans, most of them white. And they did so on the same campus - and at the very same time - that state officials were conducting the infamous Tuskegee syphilis studies.
Rebecca Skloot
#62. Fiction about mining has a long tradition - Emile Zola's 'Germinal' and Upton Sinclair's 'King Coal' come to mind - and most readers will be aware of the industry's harsh conditions.
Floyd Skloot
#63. Most people imagine music playing in their heads, but some hallucinate music; some cannot sleep because of the soundtrack in their mind.
Floyd Skloot
#64. There are more than one hundred strains of HPV in existence, thirteen of which cause cervical, anal, oral, and penile cancer - today, around 90 percent of all sexually active adults become infected with at least one strain during their lifetimes.
Rebecca Skloot
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