Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.

What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

When you win, you often lose, that's just a fact. There's no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.

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

You live it forward, but understand it backward.

I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn't change them. That hurt.