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

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

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.

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

Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.