“I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.”

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.

Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.

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.

My parents didn’t make a lot of money. My dad was not a high school graduate.

Understood what the struggle was about. My mother. Couldn’t read or write, but she had more sense than many a graduate from Harvard.

My dad didn’t graduate from high school, ended up being a printing salesman, probably never made more than $8,000 a year.

My dad never graduated high school. He was a printing salesman.

Very early on in this process though I studied acting in high school and college, soon after graduation,

The jobs for 7 million university graduates every year, the immense corruption: Even some Western governments would have to scramble to find solutions to such problems.

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

Yeah, I left Idaho at 17. You know, I graduated high school a year early and just, you know, the typical story, packed up my car and moved out.