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

When I use the word 'healing', by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we're very good at handling, but there's always a sense of the violation. 'Why me?' '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.

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

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

When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.

You live it forward, but understand it backward.