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

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?

The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.

It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.

For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.

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).