“Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.

When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.

We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.

The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.

If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.

What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.

We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.

When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘

Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?

I was really intrigued by the idea of using live streams of data that’s relevant to real people, and that would allow us to reflect and learn about ourselves.

I want to leave my readers with a sequence of ideas/phrases that makes them question something they’d taken for granted. Or that confuses them to the point that they laugh, but contains one or two phrases/lines that stick in their minds.

Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they’ve forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.

I have to say, this sounds like the worst idea in a thousand generations of bad ideas.” “You haven’t heard all our ideas.” Luke & Bhindi Drayson

It’s really nice when you can sit down with somebody and just talk to them, and talk about your ideas and what you think the character is, and they respond to it. It’s a really nice way to do it, but it doesn’t happen very often.

To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.

Paintings! They’re like TV, but they don’t move.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.