“It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.”

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.

For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.

I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

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

The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t.

A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.

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.

My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession

Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.

What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?

Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.

Generosity is not only about money. There is more than one currency. Let your generosity be pervasive in life.

Before things are written down they don’t exist in quite the same way. The act of fixing them in words gives them a kind of currency that can be traded.

From now on, the pound abroad is worth 14 per cent or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued.

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

Is a currency worth anything if no one wants it? We used to buy shoes in Italy. Remember?

Gold is a relic from a time when government’s were less trustworthy in these matters (currency debasement) than they are now.

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.

Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.