“Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.”

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Geography is destiny.

Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It’s a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.

I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “

Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals

She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…

I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.

They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.

A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.

Being the first born gives you great patience.

Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.

Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife? And yet men expect that women shall put on altogether new characters when they are married, and girls think that they can do so.

A village in a country which is taking pains to become altogether standardized and pure, which aspires to succeed Victorian England as the chief mediocrity of the world, is no longer merely provincial, no longer downy and restful in its leaf-shadowed ignorance. It is a force seeking to conquer the earth.

In the misfortunes of our best friends we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.

Then the small amount of forces that we would have left there might have slowed this day, but they wouldn’t have prevented it altogether.

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).