“When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.”

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.

A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.

I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.

My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession

Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.

I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.

We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.

I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.

Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.

For age is opportunity no less Than youth itself, though in another dress, And as the evening twilight fades away The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.

Temptation, if it is not to conquer, must not fall like a bomb against another bomb of instantaneous moral explosions, but against the strong walls of an impregnable fortress strongly built up, stone by stone, beginning at that distant day when the foundations were first laid.

We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.

It would almost need a Mafia-like offer I couldn’t refuse to do another movie.

Be not entangled in this world of days and nights; Thou hast another time and space as well.

All things are filled full of signs, and it is a wise man who can learn about one thing from another.

Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.

Rock n’ roll sounded like music from another planet. The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis – all them people.