“If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.”

The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Geography is destiny.

Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It’s a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

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.

True prosperity is the result of well-placed confidence in ourselves and our fellow man.

Lots of fellows think a home is only good to borrow money on.

He finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not color’d like his own, and having pow’r T’ enforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.

What do I see there but a frail being forever unable to bring man to heel and force him to bend a knee. This creature, although emanated from him, dominates him, knows how to offend him and thereby merit torments eternally! What a weak fellow, this God!

Very often the quiet fellow has said all he knows

An optimist is a fellow who believes what’s going to be will be postponed

The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree and hoping you don’t see him is the fellow that you’d better find out why.

A fellow ought to save a few of the long evenings he spends with his girl till after they’re married.