Phantom limb Quotes

“She never got a chance to fall out of love, to do it properly, slowly and thoroughly, and the result was he was like a phantom limb. Gone but still there. And like a true phantom limb, the preponderance of feelings associated with him were painful.”

“Sometimes I hear Mark laugh, and some days in the car the right song will come on the satellite radio and I'll feel him there tingling like a phantom limb. Like he's sitting there next to me in the dark. But I know that's not so. And I know that when you die there's not even darkness, and I know Mark and me won't meet on some cloud or in some pit of fire. And I guess that's a good thing. I couldn't take those eyes seeing what's become of me, those eyes looking down at my hands and my chewed-up ragged nails.”

“Mourning is never really complete. The mappings of the old play remain in the cortex, like those mappings of the phantom limb.”

“Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.”

“You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.”

“She can feel her vanished talent like a phantom limb, the empty ache of its subtraction from the short list of her assets, and she knows with spiteful certainty that it is gone for good.”

“The heart did ache, actually. She felt a dull grind of lack somewhere near her diaphragm, a pain that occupied the space of something removed. A phantom limb. A scratchy hunger. The wasting muscle fatigue of want.”

“I once saw a show about an amputee who lost his leg and still feels it. He actually wakes up at night to scratch his leg as if it’s still there, attached to him. They call it a phantom limb.I would be like that. A phantom draki, tormented with the memory of what I once was.”