I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams.

Being the first born gives you great patience.

She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.

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

Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.

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.

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.