“By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.”

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.

One-time revenue spikes that aren’t repeatable won’t help you achieve consistent year-after-year growth.

I would love to get great performances from actors as a director, because that’s what I’m always looking for, a director that’s going to help me go places I’ve never been before.

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters – because we never know which things might.

Helping begins with listening.

Self-deprecation is not an answer to keeping one’s balance. I think that it’s very damaging.

When people help one another in sin and transgression, they finish by hating each other.

We can help others in the world more by making the most of yourself than in any other way.

The question before the advanced nations is not whether they can afford to help the developing nations, but whether they can afford not to do so.