“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.”

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.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.

I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.

The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.

It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.

Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.

Every loss recapitulates earlier losses, but every affirmation of identity echoes earlier moments of clarity.

An Experiment, like every other event which takes place, is a natural phenomenon; but in a Scientific Experiment the circumstances are so arranged that the relations between a particular set of phenomena may be studied to the best advantage.

President Obama is highly concerned with education. He’s a champion on early-childhood development strategies.

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

They shot the ball well early. What comes out of the microwave hot doesn’t always stay hot. I know, because I eat bagels in the morning.

Maybe. But the reality is that our early interests are fragile, vaguely defined, and in need of energetic, years-long cultivation and refinement.

Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.

Heaven gives its favourites-early death.