“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.”

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.

The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you

Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.

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

My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.

And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.

Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted

God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.

How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.

He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.

If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’

Don’t Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret.

Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.

He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.

In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we ‘battle’ cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation.

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.