My Lobotomy Quotes

“We are all victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say, 'I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and i'm going to try to make myself a life worth living.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“When we realize, really get to know what stinkers we are, it takes only a little depression to tip the scales in favor of suicide. - Dr. Walter Freeman (62)”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“Is this every kid's worst fear - that his mother and father don't love him? It was mine. (239)”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“We never talked about the future. We never talked about what would happen when we got out of Rancho Linda. I don't know if that's being a teenager, or being a teenager in a place like Rancho Linda, but you lived only for the day, or only for the moment. It was all about getting through whatever was happening right now. You didn't worry too much about what was coming later, because right now was all you could deal with.
It was like you were in a river, caught in the current, and you were going whatever way it took you. You knew you had no control over your own destiny-- so you didn't dream, and you didn't plan. There was no reason to plan. You knew you had to survive what you were going through, and the way to make it survivable was to try to have fun.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“She gives your son a lobotomy, and that’s okay. Then she’s mean to your dog and you get a divorce?”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“And has anything changed today? Where are the authorities now? How come any regular M.D. or pediatrician is allowed to diagnose depression or bipolar illness or ADD in children, and prescribe medications, without a second opinion? How many children are taking powerful brain medications now simply because their parents find them too difficult to handle? How many of those boys and girls are having their childhoods taken away from them, the way mine was taken away from me?”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“We are all victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, or we can say, "I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and now I'm going to try to make myself a life worth living”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“When you’ve been at the bottom, nothing looks that bad, and I had been at the bottom for quite a while. The bottom was normal for me. But the bottom got worse.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“That’s true for everybody, I guess. We are all the victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn’t really our fault, or we can say, “I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and I’m going to try to make myself a life worth living.”   I”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“my earliest memories of the snow are unhappy ones. I stepped into a snow drift that was so deep I sank in up to my waist and couldn’t get out.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“We are all the victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn’t really our fault, or we can say, “I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and I’m going to try to make myself a life worth living.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“Maybe that’s part of why I behaved badly. I was being treated like a bad boy, so I acted like a bad boy. The rules weren’t fair, so I broke the rules.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“I know we must always watch out for 'quacks,' however, most people do not realize that many of the most dangerous, outrageous therapies are the ones approved by the 'traditional' medicine establishment.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“You don't have to be crazy to act crazy. You just have to know what crazy people act like. And I had plenty of experience watching crazy people.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy: A Memoir

“You were sitting up in the bed, with two black eyes,” Brian said later. “You looked listless. And sad. Like a zombie. It’s not a nice word to use, but it’s the only word to use. You were zoned out and staring. I was in shock. And sad. It was just terribly sad.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“On more than one occasion, Williams had to open the skull the old-fashioned way and surgically remove two or three inches of broken-off steel from behind the eye sockets, cleaning up after Freeman had made a mess.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“One of his surgical assistants—Jonathan Williams, who replaced James Watt after Watt refused to go along with Freeman’s plan to do lobotomies in his office, without a surgeon present—later told a story about a patient who had been brought to Freeman for a lobotomy. The day before the surgery, though, he’d gotten cold feet and refused to go through with the operation. He locked himself in his hotel room. Freeman, contacted by the patient’s family, drove to the hotel and convinced the patient to let him in. Using a portable electroshock machine he had designed and built for himself, he administered a few volts to the patient to calm him down. According to Williams, “The patient was…held down on the floor while Freeman administered the shock. It then occurred to him that since the patient was already unconscious, and he had a set of leucotomes in his pocket, he might as well do the transorbital lobotomy then and there, which he did.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“On one five-week driving tour of America, he visited eight states and performed 111 lobotomies. He made these tours driving a specially outfitted car that he called “The Lobotomobile.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“In an attempt to learn more about what happened during a lobotomy, Freeman tried performing them with the patient wide awake, under local anesthesia. During one of these procedures, Freeman asked the patient, while cutting his brain tissue, what was going through his mind. “A knife,” the patient said. Freeman told this story with pleasure for years.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy

“One patient died on the operating table when Freeman stopped, mid-surgery, to take a photograph.”
― Howard Dully, My Lobotomy