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

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.

No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.

I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn’t change them. That hurt.

We must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.

If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

This is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil

I’m not sure what Essiac does to extend cancer survival, and for all we know it may not have this effect.

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.

Suspicion is the cancer of friendship.

One time there was a student at Punjab University in Lahore who came down with cancer and his friend came to me for help. I stood outside on the street in Lahore and asked the people in that city for help. Within four or five hours, I received more than 40 million rupees [more than US $670,000].

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

I’ve had a hip replacement, I’ve beaten cancer, I had my hand operation, and I stopped drinking. Something inside of me just went, ‘I’m done.’