“There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’”

The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.

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

My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.

And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted

God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.

He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.

If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’

Don’t Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret.

Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.

He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we ‘battle’ cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation.

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

The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.

Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.

I grew up in a very suburban neighborhood, so I was used to everything being safe and lovely.

Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is.

Listen, I have to spend every single day living with me, so I know for a fact; I’m lovely, I’m completely lovely.

It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one.

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head.