“The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.”

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.

Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.

To me, nothing else about a tree is so remarkable as the extreme delicacy of the mechanism by which it grows and lives.

In this universe the top end is light and the bottom end is real hard stuff.

The fine, hair-like rootlets at the bottom and the microscopical cells of the leaves at the top.

Any journey around Islington involves hundreds of speed bumps that seem to tear the bottom of your car off.

The role of humour is to make people fall down and writhe on the Axminster, and that is the top and bottom of it.

One recipe for happiness is to have to sense of entitlement.’ To this she added a star and noted at the bottom of the page: ‘This is not a lesson I have ever been in a position to learn.

Illogically, I tend to assume that if you ( Philip Larkin) dream of caning schoolgirls bottoms, it disqualifies you from dismissing half the nation as work-shy.

Fifty percent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.