“Well, you have the right to make a sacrifice of yourself, but I ll be damned if I ll let you sacrifice me!”
“What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania. “She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—” “Where did she get it from?” “Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.” Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut. Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.” Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound. He was barely breathing. “The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure, told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage, to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?”
“Also … the plan sounded exactly like the sneaky, twisted, ridiculously annoying and noble sort of thing Leo Valdez would do.”
“SNAPE: Sometimes costs are made to be borne.”
“I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.”
“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you re not really losing it. You re just passing it on to someone else.”
“She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love... That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don t have enough of their own.”
“Sacrifice is a part of life. It s supposed to be. It s not something to regret. It s something to aspire to.”
“Sometimes the prize is not worth the costs. The means by which we achieve victory are as important as the victory itself.”
“Life is funny. Things change, people change, but you will always be you, so stay true to yourself and never sacrifice who you are for anyone.”
“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me? But...the good Samaritan reversed the question: If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
“She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you d given up the thing you most wanted. Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: She never asked me.”
“...I have so many dreams of my own, and I remember things from my childhood, from when I was a girl and a young woman, and I haven t forgotten a thing. So why did we think of Mom as a mom from the very beginning? She didn t have the opportunity to pursue her dreams, and all by herself, faced everything the era dealt her, poverty and sadness, and she couldn t do anything about her very bad lot in life other than suffer through it and get beyond it and live her life to the very best of her ability, giving her body and her heart to it completely. Why did I never give a thought to Mom s dreams?”
“I’m willing to walk in darkness if it keeps humans in the light.”
“We set out to save the Shire, Sam and it has been saved - but not for me.”
“It wasn t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.”
“Regardless of the advertising campaigns may tell us, we can t have it all. Sacrifice is not an option, or an anachronism; it s a fact of life. We all cut off our own limbs to burn on some altar. The crucial thing is to choose an altar that s worth it and a limb you can accept losing. To go consenting to the sacrifice.”