“When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘”

She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.

Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read

We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.

There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

Make something beautiful of your life.

When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.

I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,

I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.

Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.

You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.

What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.

I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.

My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.

The Elements of Prayer|Its ground: God, by whose goodness it springeth in us. |Its use: to turn our will to His will. |Its end: to be made one with Him and like to Him in all things.

A young man passes from our public schools to the universities, ignorant almost of the elements of every branch of useful knowledge.

Thus, while I thought myself employed only in forming a Nomenclature, and while I proposed to myself nothing more than to improve the chemical language, my work transformed itself by degrees, without my being able to prevent it, into a treatise upon the Elements of Chemistry.

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work.

We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.

That element of surprise is what I look for when I am writing. It is my way of judging what I am doing – which is never an easy thing to do.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

I always knew I would be successful. So there was no element of surprise.